SD-WAN is taking off, but customers should be disappointed. As Node4 Sales Director, Shane Dove, pointed out in a previous article on UC Today, IDC expects a 40% annual growth rate for the SD-WAN market through 2022. That’s exciting growth. Clearly the hesitation for investing in SD-WAN is dwindling, and rightly so— SD-WAN can reduce costs, improve business application performance and agility and optimise the end user’s experience.
While it seems that SD-WAN is the best and brightest option for amplified connection speed and bandwidth for businesses, customers often don’t see these benefits. Why? Many lack the education to take advantage of them. And, frankly, that’s our fault as solution providers.
A Real-World Example
Not long ago, I was talking to a customer who described an all-too familiar situation. His business had a history of bandwidth issues. That didn’t surprise me considering it was a fast-growing finance company with a sizable remote staff. When he told how his team addressed these issues, my jaw dropped. The company’s 100 Mbps broadband connection had hit capacity, so they added a Verizon Fios connection—not replaced, but added—thinking they could run high-priority data centre traffic over Fios and keep voice and video traffic on their 100 Mbps connection.
On paper, this makes sense—until you look closer. By installing Fios and keeping the existing broadband connection, this company was effectively doubling spend to run two separate networks. That’s like building a different four-lane highway for every type of vehicle. Sure, your traffic flow will increase in efficiency, but the cost of developing and managing that extra infrastructure is massive.
I’ll never forget the look on this gentleman’s face when I explained the concept of SD-WAN. He genuinely thought I was pulling his leg about a model that would allow his business to bundle its circuits and distribute traffic across different connections based on priority or type.
Buy Better, Not Bigger
The above situation blew me away. Not because of how unfamiliar this customer was with SD-WAN, but because of how prevalent this unfamiliarity is across the business landscape.
The networking space isn’t immune to the same phenomenon that drives consumers to spend ungodly amounts of money to grow their Air Jordan collections and fill garages with their third, fourth and fifth vehicles. If a product isn’t satisfying, just buy another, bigger one. The paradox is as you fill your garage with cars, the effort, cost and inconvenience of managing those luxuries grow exponentially. In business IT, as networks are pushed to be more flexible and available, this paradigm simply can’t last.
Customers are not at fault for perpetuating this phenomenon in IT—providers are. It’s our responsibility to make it easier for businesses to buy better, not just bigger, by offering robust education and options. SD-WAN is a great solution for networking optimisation, but without the knowledge and availability of it as an alternative to an existing, ill-fitting solution, no customer will ever be able to take advantage of it.
The situation I mentioned really opened my eyes to how much we need to improve as solution providers. By providing better education about the benefits and applications of SD-WAN, we can meet our customers where they stand and offer the level of support this burgeoning marketplace deserves.
Guest Blog by Jason Price, Senior Advisor of Cloud Services at Select Communications
Select Communications is dedicated to delivering affordable, flexible technology solutions to SMB organisations, specialising in the areas of conferencing, phone systems, security, connectivity and SD-WAN, cloud and colocation and network services.
