Creating SD-WAN Service Differentiation in a Competitive Market

Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) remain one of the highest growth segments in the telecommunications industry. The ability to transform enterprise WAN connectivity in alignment with digital transformation and cloud initiatives creates a new opportunity for revenue growth in the important B2B market space. SD-WAN allows for applications to be dispersed in multiple public and private cloud platforms, on premise and in data centers. As Enterprises expect on-demand, secure and easy access to their applications and network services delivered with the highest performance assured, SD-WAN reliability and flexibility help bring new levels of agility.

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) have a tremendous opportunity to become strategic partners to their enterprise customers with a competitive managed SD-WAN offering. While CSP managed SD-WAN deployments are starting to gain traction, differentiation is critical in this highly competitive market, requiring CSPs to offer a choice of SD-WAN and value-added virtualized services from multiple vendors to meet the specific needs of their enterprise customers. Successful service differentiation requires automation, interoperability and agility, and in particular:

• The flexibility that empowers enterprises to control their own services with full visibility and assurance, along with the ability to easily purchase new services;
• The elimination of the dependence between the SD-WAN application and the CPE device by allowing the customer to choose from a wide range of open, commercial-off-the-shelf hardware platforms;
• The ability to react to new service requests, changes and problem resolution in an agile fashion.

The success delivery of SD-WAN services requires more than simple cloud-based connectivity. It requires a complex, integrated process that aligns connectivity, CPE integration, virtual network functions, orchestration, billing/payment and digital self-service capabilities. This complex array of functions must be linked together seamlessly, yet remain flexible enough to allow for service revisions as demands shift or newer functionality is required by the customer. A solution stack such as this will most likely be delivered using a broad set of technology vendors, which with additional requirements like security and WAN acceleration, increases complexity even more.

The challenge is not insurmountable, as an upcoming MEF Proof of Concept, led by NTT, will show at the upcoming MEF19 conference in Los Angeles, California from Nov 18-22. Working with technology partners Netcracker, NEC, Versa Networks, Silver Peak,  ADVA and Spirent, this PoC will showcase the delivery of SD-WAN and related value-added services using an integrated multi-vendor approach.

In advance of the conference, we invite you to download our whitepaper, “Orchestrated Virtualized Multi-Vendor SD-WAN Service – A MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept”.  The paper provides an overview of the proof of concept, vendor responsibilities, overview of the architecture and responsibilities of each component throughout the service delivery process flow.

You can also learn more about how Netcracker can support CSP specific and Cable MSO specific SD-WAN enablement initiatives and be a strategic partner in your roll-out and delivery strategy.