Silver Peak Claims 1,000th Customer
Silver Peak today announced it has exceeded a 1,000 global customer milestone in an ongoing mission to build software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) as a separate distinct networking category.
Company CEO David Hughes says that while rivals such as Cisco are focused on embedding SD-WAN functionality they acquired into routers or a gateway, Silver Peak is succeeding by focusing its research and development efforts on making it easier to manage wide area networks at time when there is a sea change occurring in terms of how applications are accessed.
“Cloud applications have changed the traffic patterns in the WAN,” says Hughes.
The Silver Peak customer base for the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN, first launched three years ago, spans organizations directly supported by Silver Peak or one of its service provider partners. New EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution customers include: Andersen Tax LLC, Gerresheimer AG, NSW Department of Planning and Environment, Integra Life Sciences, J-U-B Engineers Inc., Republic Bank and Trust, SiteOne Landscape Supply, Southern Cross Austereo, Tennesse Oncology, Universal Health Services and Westrac.
With more applications now running in the cloud than in on-premises IT environments, legacy router platforms are simply too complex to manage, says Hughes.
Hughes also dismisses rival efforts to converge the management of SD-WANs and local area networks. Network traffic in LANs is measured in microseconds, while WAN traffic is measured in milliseconds. Those two different constructs required different constructs for managing each environment.
Fresh off raising $90 million in funding, Hughes says rivals such as Cisco are a lot focused on trying to sell additional routers than making it simpler to manage WANs. Cisco last year acquired Viptela, a rival provider of an SD-WAN platform. Since then Cisco has moved to embed Viptela SD-WAN functionality into it routers in addition to signaling its commitment to include Vipela software in a next generation secure Internet gateway that company plans to launch following its formal acquisition of Duo Security.
Silver Peak, in the meantime, is investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to further simplify management of SD-WANs, says Hughes. As part of that effort Silver Peak is focusing solely on SD-WANs as a platform versus turning SD-WANs into an embedded feature of another platform.
