CDW and WWT among first to receive Silver Peak's new certification

UK-based partners also named as among first resellers to join vendor's new certified deployment programme

CDW and World Wide Technology are among the first organisations to be awarded Silver Peak's latest accreditation as certified deployment partners (CDP).

The SD-WAN vendor's - which is set to be acquired by HPE for $925m - new CDP programme allows select partners to resell and deploy its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform while supporting customer WAN and security transformation.

The initial partners to achieve the new accreditation are: CDW, Intervision, Invite Networks, World Wide Technology (WWT), Teneo and Xalient - the latter pair of which are headquartered in Reading and Grimsby, respectively.

"Modern enterprises are quickly recognising that their legacy networks are holding them back from realising the full transformational promise of the cloud and many are seeking skilled partners to drive their WAN and security transformation initiatives," said Ken Marks, Silver Peak's VP of North America channel sales.

"This provides an unprecedented opportunity for our partners to bring new levels of business value to customers by attaining the training and certifications required to successfully drive SD-WAN deployments.

"The CDP programme is architected to scale both the number of customers we can serve as well as the number of partners that we can enable to build high-growth profitable SD-WAN business practices - it's a win-win for everyone."

Partners must complete a "rigorous" training and certification regimen, requiring advanced deployment certifications with exams, as well as partnering with a Silver Peak deployment engineer to demonstrate the requisite skill needed to span initial design, deployment plan and post-deployment review.

"We're excited to be part of the Silver Peak CDP programme," said Mike Grisamore, VP of services delivery at CDW. "

"We've seen a dramatic increase in demand for WAN expertise as customers accelerate cloud and digital transformation initiatives. Having sales, technical and deployment expertise in-house will enable us to bring new levels of value to our joint customers as they embark on WAN transformation initiatives."

Jeff Wynne, VP of services at WWT, added: "Organisations are increasingly turning to SD-WAN for their digital transformation initiatives, optimisation of SaaS and cloud applications, and more efficient IT operations.

"The rigorous training, testing and certification requirements of the Silver Peak CDP programme expands our in-house teams' resident SD-WAN acumen, enabling our teams to continue building cloud-first business-driven networks for our customers."