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SDN Africa brings Aryaka services to SA

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 01 Jul 2015
Network expansion should not be the bottleneck in a company's global development strategy, says SDN Africa's Brett Steingo.
Network expansion should not be the bottleneck in a company's global development strategy, says SDN Africa's Brett Steingo.

Aryaka has appointed SDN Africa, a provider of software-defined networking solutions, as the official distributor of the company's wide area network (WAN) optimisation as-a-service in sub-Saharan Africa.

SDN Africa will represent Aryaka in the region through an exclusive reseller agreement.

According to Brett Steingo, MD of SDN Africa, the company will partner with a small number of selected resellers to help access markets around the country.

There is only an Aryaka point-of-presence in Johannesburg but the company is looking to expand around the SA and countries in sub-Saharan Africa, says Steingo.

Through the agreement, SDN Africa will enable SA companies to take advantage of the growing number of cloud applications without being derailed by network requirements, he adds.

Steingo points out companies that are adopting cloud solutions in SA are essentially bringing an overseas 'branch' into their networks. Whether they are accessing Azure in London or Salesforce.com in the US, they need to ensure their network is optimised for these applications.

Lack of bandwidth means WAN optimisation services are often needed to ensure these cloud services function optimally, Steingo notes.

He points out network expansion should not be the bottleneck in a company's global development strategy. With WAN optimisation as-a-service, companies that wish to expand outside of the continent can do so now far more easily and less expensively than ever before.

"SA companies are spending in excess of R 25 million per annum on WAN optimisation in order to try to address WAN performance issues. They are putting more and more proprietary equipment into their networks and spending more and more resources on managing all of this and it is clearly not a sustainable model."

Every time a company adds equipment to their network, it adds cost, complexity and operational overheads, explains Steingo.

"In the same way as it is not efficient for every company to build its own data centre rather than use cloud computing, it makes no sense to keep deploying WAN optimisation equipment and hiring people to manage it when one can simply buy the functionality 'as-a-service'."

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