SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

SD-WAN Vendor Aryaka Secures $50 Million in Funding Led by Goldman Sachs to Drive Growth

May 01, 2019

By Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director

SD-WAN vendor Aryaka (News - Alert) closed a Series F funding round, led by Goldman Sachs.  The $50 million round brings Aryaka’s total funding to $184 million.  Goldman’s Michael Dorr will join Aryaka’s Board and Michael Kondoleon will become an observer.




Shashi Kiran (News - Alert), Aryaka’s CMO, is excited about the additional investment from a recognized leader in the investment banking community.  He said Aryaka is shifting into a higher growth model and will look to take the funding and scale its go-to-market efforts and to attract and acquire high-level talent to support its growth.

As for Goldman, he explained, “Under the hood they were very impressed with the technology, which is very differentiated in the market.  It’s a very noisy space but we are differentiated, and they understand that.”

Dorr supported that comment:  “Aryaka offers a compelling solution for the SD-WAN market that continues to grow exponentially including increased adoption of SD-WAN managed services.  We decided to invest in Aryaka because of its highly differentiated offering, strong customer base, global footprint and its experienced management team.”

A big part of that differentiation comes from Aryaka’s global backbone, which it supports with 35 global POPs currently.  It’s a fully meshed layer 2 network, which Kiran says is no more than 20ms away from any new site that needs to be brought online.  Even if one or two happen to go down, there is no impact on connectivity because the meshing.

Aryaka, he says, is the only SD-WAN provider that combines the two primary models for a competitive advantage, combining the overlay model most pure SD-WAN vendors employ with the managed SD-WAN model network operators favor. 

“We have our own WAN optimization software and our own network security, and a very sophisticated automation orchestration engine,” he said.  “It’s like and Uber at the end controller and orchestrates thousands of sites globally.”

The result is a fully integrated enterprise connectivity offering it delivers as a consumable service.  Cloud is the dominant model in the enterprise, so why should the WAN be any different, Kiran asks.  But what really makes it work for Aryaka and has driven its growth is its ability to deliver the cloud-based SD-WAN as a global managed service and focus on application performance, key for any enterprise.

“We win every time every time a customer has a global site that needs to be brought on board,” Kiran commented.

Most of the traditional players don’t have a cloud presence, so they have to use VMs connected in the public cloud.  That requires additional management workload and adds a layer of complexity.  As part of its multi-cloud strategy, Aryaka has built partnerships with the top public cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Oracle (News - Alert).  Through these relationships, it is able to offer reliable managed cloud connectivity options in a multi-cloud environment.

“We have POPs that are part of the public cloud environment, which allows us to normalize cloud connectivity as part of our default offering without the need for VMs to be spin up and maintained and managed,” explained Kiran.  “Customers just subscribe to Aryaka connectivity and indicate the cloud providers they want to use.”

SD-WAN Expo 2020, taking place in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 12-14, will take another close look at what’s driving the SD-WAN market, how vendors like Aryaka and others are competing in the market, and how the market will evolve in the coming year.   The Call for Speakers for SD-WAN 2020 is currently accepting submissions.  In particular, the 2020 edition of the conference will focus on live use cases and success stories.  If you have a compelling customer story you’d like to share with the audience in Florida, submit your proposal today.




Edited by Erik Linask

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