Why CIOs are leaving WAN acceleration appliance vendors behind

WAN acceleration works, but hardware holds the space back

By Larry Chaffin, Chairman and CEO, Pluto Cloud Services

Don’t get me wrong, WAN acceleration is great for companies and anyone who is not using it is being left behind by competitors. Why do you think telco carriers are now offering MPLS and WAN acceleration as a service to customers (even though it’s really expensive and the managed service is horrible), they could no longer lie to customers about adding bandwidth will fix your problems.

But there is a price for WAN acceleration appliance vendors that CIOs are starting to see, that’s the constant refreshing or replacement of appliance every few years. This is due to two facts: vendors make money by putting appliances on end of life for new versions of the appliance. The second it is how they make money on current customers. But this creates problems for some CIOs.

Many companies cannot afford the capex to replace appliances; many cannot afford the yearly maintenance year after year. So they just don’t refresh and allow the appliances to go on with no maintenance until they fail. Then they just pull them out. . .

. . . Between the problems with telco carrier mpls in my previous blog and the price of WAN acceleration appliances our customer base needed a change, hence our partnership with Aryaka Networks. Providing our customers with a network that’s better and more secure than any telco MPLS network with the advantages of a WAN acceleration is what we needed. It is what our customer wanted.

When Aryaka Networks came out with their program to buy back Riverbed Steelheads from customers who moved to Aryaka Networks it was a game changer for customers. They could get shown a better ROI over MPLS and appliance vendors plus have no more capex or yearly maintenance. Even when competing with telco carriers like Orange, British Telecom, AT&T or Verizon and their MPLS with wan acceleration appliances, we have shown customers a better ROI, price, and network.

Read the rest of Larry Chaffin’s post on LinkedIn.