Aryaka co-founder: 'people are wary of SD-WAN because it's a loose term'
Ashwath Nagaraj talks to CRN about the biggest hurdles SD-WAN must overcome to see mainstream acceptance
There is still channel wariness about SD-WAN because of confusion around what the term means, according to Aryaka CTO Ashwath Nagaraj.
Nagaraj co-founded SD-WAN vendor Aryaka a decade ago and since then has seen more competitors enter the space.
He told CRN that when Aryaka was formed in 2009 as a completely software-defined company, there was "no such thing as SD-WAN". It started to describe itself as an SD-WAN vendor when the term became popular in 2015.
"People are wary about SD-WAN because the term is very loose," he explained.
"Many people put a lot of definitions on SD-WAN, but to me, it's an umbrella of quite a lot of functions.
"The underlying theme has become more that a customer who's sitting on an expensive, hard-to-manage, inflexible network needs a new technology that allows them to start to get out of those shackles.
"And partners will start to embrace it as simply a question of ‘what are the focus areas they're looking at?'"
This confusion around the meaning of SD-WAN and what it comprises has led to partners adopting a "mix and match" mentality to the market, according to Nagaraj, who predicted that the next few years will see consolidation in this regard.
"I think all different pieces of technology that come under the umbrella of SD-WAN have different applicability, and for a partner or systems integrator or a service provider looking for a technology to transition to this new world, there are a lot of the components that they need under different guises," he explained.
"Partners today are doing a sort of mix and match. Over time, I think there's going to be a little bit more consolidation.
"We look at the Ciscos of the world, we look at large service providers coming up - they will take care of merging the required pieces of technology so that the customer gets a service that works for them."
Customers do not want the headache of having to operate and maintain their own networks, as it distracts from their core work, and this is where the opportunity lies for partners, the CTO stated.
"The underlying trend I see is that companies want to do what their strengths are; they want to focus on what they do," he said.
"SD-WAN is a technology that maybe service providers will adopt to simplify the network, but the underlying trend is that the network itself - the WAN itself - is a managed service.
"And that's where partners come in, to essentially make the customer not have to deal with the network. That's the next big trend."