SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

iWANT Challenge Showcases SD-WAN Startup's Dominance

November 09, 2016

By Maurice Nagle, Web Editor

In the 1980s, Pepsi pushed its market presence forward with the creation of the “Pepsi Challenge.” The soda brand traveled from sea to shining sea, offering the American public a blind taste test between the clear market leader, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi. The results were somewhat resounding, a product of marketing genius.




The technology landscape is fraught with incumbent solutions, which aren’t necessarily the best available, but are more well known, and many firms are left with no choice but the vendor’s ecosystem. In a growing space like SD-WAN, major carriers have partnered with startups to improve portfolio offerings, whereas others are playing the role of bully (cough – Cisco (News - Alert)). We recall the Bible tale of David and Goliath, SD-WAN startup CloudGenix is relishing in its role as the underdog and besting the giant at every turn, crisscrossing the globe and offering enterprises the opportunity at taking its own Pepsi Challenge.

The iWANT CloudGenix Challenge Road Show matches the CloudGenix solution against Cisco’s to determine the most powerful SD-WAN available. And so far, after more than 30 challenges, the CloudGenix Instant On Network (ION) SD-WAN solution is stealing the show due to its ease-of-use, speed, functionality and cost savings.

The challenge is as follows. Customers will set up and configure the WAN and ensure that all locations are connected – via multiple forms of connectivity. Participants will then enable direct-to-Internet selectively for cloud-based applications – such as Salesforce or Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365 – utilizing performance-based load balancing; then comes monitoring network and application SLA. 

“Enterprises are waking up to the possibilities of dramatically simplifying their networks, lowering WAN costs by as much as 50 percent, and rapidly deploying cloud-based applications with SD-WAN,” noted Lou Fini, regional vice president at Forsythe. “However, not all SD-WANs are created equal. Unlike the alternatives – traditional legacy packet-routed approaches – CloudGenix provides an application-defined fabric that allows customers to set App-SLAs for performance, security, and compliance for application delivery to the remote office. Customers that take the iWANT CloudGenix Challenge see firsthand the benefits of an app-defined fabric, including more flexibility, enhanced performance and security.”

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. And while talk continues to be cheap, actions are speaking volumes. With its future-forward approach, from the way it runs its partner program and the “iWANT Challenge” to its unique and unobtrusive assessment tool, CloudGenix continues to separate from the pack. As we continuously push forward into a software-defined, application heavy reality, the network becomes more important than ever. Do you believe in your WAN?




Edited by Alicia Young

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