SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Versa CEO Talks About Company's SD-WAN Successes

April 30, 2018

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

Kelly Ahuja, president and CEO of Versa Networks, says the company’s business has doubled. It recently moved to new offices. It has seen significant traction with tier 1 service providers. And it’s won business from some pretty impressive enterprise customers too.




China Telecom Global, Comcast, KDDI (News - Alert), and Singtel are among the 40 to 50 communications services providers using Versa SD-WAN technology, Ahuja says. But it’s not just technology Versa is providing to the CSPs, he adds. The SD-WAN vendor is also working to help CSPs win accounts in this important new space.

Early on, CSPs saw SD-WAN as a potential threat to their existing business – cannibalizing MPLS, notes Ahuja. But now they tend to see it as enhancing MPLS for the digital, multicloud era, he says, adding that SD-WAN enables enterprises to use MPLS along with broadband, and CSPs can provide the intelligence around that and allow enterprises to reach the cloud.

Speaking of enterprises, Versa Networks also has Capital One (News - Alert) as a customer. Jason Abfalter, technology director at Capital One, said that SD-WAN helped the financial firm reduce its depency on carriers and decrease what was a three to six month provisioning time, leverage broadband internet at T1 sites, replace cellular as its only backup solution, automate provisioning and management, get visibility into performance and traffic usage, select the best performing path per workload, segregate traffic, and increase performance and resilience.

Ahuja of Versa Networks adds that SD-WAN is also a good match for 5G. It supports the mobile edge computing on which many 5G applications are expected to rely. And it’s a great fit for the cloud-native, multitenant 5G world, he says. Plus, he adds, Versa Networks can support third-party VNFs on top of its SD-WAN solution.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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