CloudGenix: The SD-WAN You Can Believe In

Recently, the IDC projected the SD-WAN space to reach a $6 billion valuation by 2020 – a market that in 2015 was valued at $225 million.  A firm making its presence known in the space, CloudGenix, recently took down Goliath and today the up-and-comer launched its Global Partner Program poised to provide the many benefits of SD-WAN worldwide.

When speaking with CloudGenix CEO Kumar Ramachadran, he outlined what separates the CloudGenix Partner Program, and it starts with the team’s approach.  With a goal of driving more value to the customer, the CloudGenix SD-WAN is the only “That you can go directly to cloud with no compromise,” offering the ability to provide security and performance controls regardless of location.

The new channel program comes as a response to customer demand. Ramachadran explains, CloudGenix leverages its partner channel for business. With over 100 partners, the SD-WAN provider’s sales channel is an extremely collaborative arena – sharing leads, building a “sales engine” – whereas the traditional sales model allows for customer engagement based on the buying cycle, the new partner program provides for added engagement opportunities as a result of its software-based solutions. This allows for the channel to discuss with customers, and align with CIO priorities to help drive new revenue.

Ramachadran explained, by having new engagement opportunities to speak with customers – based on customer product priority— the CloudGenix team is able to work the firm’s time table. “We are able to integrate very well with your existing network. When the time is right you can retire your Cisco (News - Alert) network, for example.”

The program is “Changing the nature of how a partner is supposed to engage with customers.” With CloudGenix, “We are enabling partners to offer the industry’s first SD-WAN assessment service.” In short, after a week or so of unobtrusively gathering environment information (video, UC, cloud-based applications, SLA at app level, network level) “the CloudGenix cloud-based engine crunches all the data and delivers a powerful set of recommendations based on assessment to apply to network.” In taking the engine’s suggestions and moving to SD-WAN, a firm could cut cost by around 70 percent.

Its “homegrown” solution leverages unique in application-based metrics, performance, end-user experience in conjunction with network metrics to create actionable insight for the customer, and paints a powerful picture.

CloudGenix explains to customers what it means to truly have an SD-WAN solution. Ramachadran noted a “Pepsi challenge type competition,” where it was Cisco’s SD-WAN versus CloudGenix. The audience walked through several use cases. In nearly two hours some were able to successfully complete the tasks using the Cisco solution whereas those putting the CloudGenix solution were able to complete the same tasks in a matter of minutes.  The channel is leveraging this same approach with customers, as channel partners are proposing the same challenge with the results speaking for themselves.

“Often times customers are in a transition from hardware to software, because CloudGenix is completely software based, the channel can add a line item to align to what you’re doing with applications and cost structure,” and because of this, explains Ramachadran, the channel  investment is not nearly as high as years and sales models past.

CloudGenix is a firm focused on “fundamental transformation.” After 30 years of networking, the SD-WAN provider has created a product that eliminates the need for routing and hardware for networking needs, dramatically simplifying networking.

Ramachadran left me with an anecdote; he recently received an email from one of CloudGenix’s largest channel partners explaining how a customer was faced with setting up multiple branches and a network, and was able to do so in less than five minutes. As Ramachadran put it, “He went home early, and had a great weekend.” That email is framed, and on the wall in the CEO’s office because that’s the type of transformational technology the CloudGenix teams strives to continue to innovate.