Versa Networks Talks SD-WAN at ONUG Event

SD-WAN is an important new technology that is helping businesses more affordably and efficiency architect and operate their wide area networks. In an effort to promote itself and this technology, Versa Networks was at the Open Networking User Group this week in New York talking about the Open SD-WAN Exchange and software-defined security services.

ONUG’s Open SD-WAN Exchange is an open framework for interoperability between SD-WAN vendors. And Versa has been active in this ONUG effort.

In other Versa SD-WAN news, the company just last month introduced the Open SD-WAN Ecosystem in an effort to build an open approach to SD-WAN that eliminates the need for proprietary hardware. Initial members of the ecosystem are Advantech, Lanner Electronics, and Silicom Ltd.

According to IDC (News - Alert), the total SD-WAN market is poised to reach $6 billion by 2020. SD-WAN is interesting because it enables businesses to leverage any combination of broadband (cable modem-based or DSL), MPLS, or wireless (LTE (News - Alert) or microwave) connectivity to interconnect their various locations and have control, reliability, and visibility across all of the above.

In some cases, SD-WAN suppliers sell direct to business customers. At the same time, SD-WAN technology is beginning to be adopted by communications service providers, which are leveraging it to offer new managed services for their business customers.

For example, Versa’s SD-WAN technology is being used today but Colt Technology Services to offer managed SD-WAN services in 13 European countries. 

“Putting it simply, the customer wants secure, guaranteed delivery with quality of service for their data network,” said Peter Coppens, Colt’s director of network portfolio. “But they don’t want increasing data capacity requirements to mean more expensive bandwidth circuits. The solution is to use the public internet for those apps which are not latency critical like email or web surfing, while reserving your data networks for the mission critical, high bandwidth applications. Data over the internet is still secured by using IPSec tunnels; and the customer is free to use their existing internet service provider if they so wish.”