Subscribe

CloudWAN to shake up SA's SD-WAN market

Matthew Burbidge
By Matthew Burbidge
Johannesburg, 09 Jun 2017

As the crowded SD-WAN market heats up, there is no shortage of options for enterprises.

Internet Solutions (IS) and Japanese telecommunications behemoth NTT's Innovation Institute unveiled their offering -- CloudWAN -- at its worldwide launch in Johannesburg yesterday. The Japanese launch will take place in about a week.

It's a virtual WAN solution for enterprise networking, but will also probably appeal to SMEs.

For organisations that haven't yet invested in SD-WAN, their networks require hardware such as routers, switches, proxy servers and firewalls, among others, as well as engineers to install, configure and test the hardware. It's also cumbersome to provision a network to a new branch.

CloudWAN delivers cloud-based, centralised network provision and management.

Probably the biggest differentiator between this product and the many others is that it's agnostic.

As ML Labuschagne, product development manager, connectivity at IS, tells it: "The nice thing about this product and this device [the CloudWAN appliance] is that we can build your VPN tunnel over any third-party VPN connection. So if you've got Vumatel, you can buy the white box (the CloudWAN appliance) and get a VPN connection back into your existing head office VPN.

"Our whole play here is not to only cater for greenfields, but also for brownfields, so that all our existing clients with MPLS [Multiprotocol Label Switching] and existing VPNs don't have to replace them."

Affordable to SMEs

How is Internet Solutions taking the product to market?

Ebrahim Vally, product manager, Internet access/SDN at IS, told ITWeb it would start with its approximately 2 000 enterprise clients. It would also market the product through Ignite, its SME business.

"Why we feel this is a win for us is that we allow an open ecosystem. Other vendors will most likely try and sell you their appliances. It's very limiting. You can run any software on our device," he says.

"A solution like this is really affordable," says Labuschagne. "If I've got a business and I've got three little stores, and I want to connect them all on one VPN, it's R2 200 a month."

IS could have launched the product a while ago, but Ravi Srivatsav, chief business development officer at the NTT Innovation Institute in Silicon Valley, says NTT in Japan had demanded it be 'perfect'.

"Even this, as a minimum viable product, has to be telco grade."

Srivatsav says the inception of the product took place at NTT in California, with input from R&D colleagues in Japan.

Battle-testing in SA

Why launch the product in SA? "It's battle-testing. If I launch my product in the United States where the networks are all solid ? my underlay network is a gigabit, it's fibre ? you don't see the scale of challenges that continents like Africa, India, give you. It's an easy win in the US. Here, in certain places, LTE doesn't work, or the underlay network is 300Kbps. In some cases, the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is being throttled. We've had a lot of challenges.

"We've been working with IS group for about a year-and-a-half and methodically thinking about the challenges we're going to face."

Share