SD-WAN: THE #1 TOPIC AT CHANNEL PARTNERS LAS VEGAS

Each year, the channel community comes together for the annual Channel Partners Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. It’s an event joined by agents, VARs, MSPs, integrators, and service providers from all over the country. The greatest sales and business development minds meet to discuss the latest trends, new and emerging technologies, and how to propose the best business solutions to customers.

This year seemed to have a central theme: connecting everything to everything. There were countless presentations during the show around the Internet of Things (IoT) and how agents can support and solve their customer’s business problems. The cloud was also an important topic, as presentation after presentation focused on what to sell, how to support it, and how to keep it secure.

But the the biggest topic seemed to be connectivity. This year, there was a huge buzz around “SD-WAN” and what it is, how to sell it, and which vendors to work with.

Team Aryaka was in full force at Channel Partners Expo, Las Vegas.

Aryaka sent out their biggest team yet to Channel Partners this year. With a small army of 17 of our best of partner sales, engineering, marketing, and management, we had the chance to address many of the concerns that the channel has around SD-WAN.

The Aryaka Experience at Channel Partners
It all started with the multiple speaking sessions we were a part of during the conference. Monday kicked off with the AVANT-led panel on “How the Disruptive Power of SD-WAN is Just the Beginning”, featuring our Director of Channel Sales, Nathan Grinnell. One of the most dramatic conversation points that Grinnell brought to the crowd was that Aryaka isn’t just SD-WAN. We’re changing the industry through providing customers with real business solutions that bring together the best of a private network, cloud and SaaS acceleration, global reach, and full visibility and management. Aryaka is more than just an SD-WAN provider – we’re a full business solution.

Day two started strong with our second event, “Successfully Selling the Fastest Growing Products: SD-WAN, UCaaS, AWS, Azure and Security.” Nathan Grinnell presented a compelling story around how Aryaka satisfies one of the most crucial business problems, delivering business-critical application to anyone in the world – and Aryaka can do it within 30ms of 95% of the world’s businesses. Not to mention the fact that Aryaka also accelerates any cloud or SaaS-based application to reach those global destinations quickly.

Aryaka’s Jim Hilbert explains the benefits of a global private network for partners offering cloud services.

Chief Revenue Officer Jim Hilbert closed out our speaking sessions with his participation in the “Experience Area Live: Cloud” session during the main floor exhibits. One of Aryaka’s biggest value propositions is its ability to accelerate cloud and SaaS-based application and to reach across the globe. Hilbert touched on this benefit and how it can act as a complementary solution to partners selling cloud deals today and can use Aryaka to deliver that data faster across a private network.

Why You Can’t Just Talk about “SD-WAN”
One of the central themes that emerged in conversations with partners throughout the week was that SD-WAN has become such a buzzword that the meaning is starting to become diluted. The saturation of the message means that partners are no longer sure which vendor to work with or when and how to determine that qualification criteria.

But customers are asking their trusted advisors about SD-WAN on a near daily basis, and it’s up to our sales partners to have all the right answers.

And this is what we hoped to get across during our time at Channel Partners last week: Aryaka is unique and unlike the “SD-WAN”s of the world: Aryaka is built on a private, Layer 2 network that handles the transport of data across the world to any user, anywhere. The term “middle mile” struck a chord with some partners as a way to understand the difference between Aryaka and SD-WAN providers that just focus on the edge.

It’s critical going into the remainder of 2017 and beyond for our partners to know that Aryaka can provide a solution for their customers that solves the problem of the middle mile for global businesses and provides a fully-managed, all-in-one solution that includes built-in SD-WAN as a value-add to an already robust MPLS replacement or alterantive.

We’re looking forward to seeing our partners again at the Channel Partners Evolution Show this September in Austin, TX!

Want to learn more about Aryaka’s partner program? Check out our Partner page today.