Making SD-WAN Services Stand Out in a CSP Portfolio
Listen to Ari Banerjee’s perspective on how CSPs must evolve their operational processes to win in the hyper-competitive SD-WAN market space.
SD-WAN as a technology is seeing incredible growth, driven by its rapid time to scale, performance, and cost benefits. For CSPs, as the primary connectivity providers to SMB and enterprises, there is a core understanding of how to differentiate the offerings, but in most cases, those services are sourced specifically from their own portfolio. From an offering standpoint, CSPs are not the unique suppliers of SD-WAN; business customers can go directly to a dedicated SD-WAN supplier to get access to services and bypass the CSP completely. As most enterprises and SMBs depend on CSPs for connectivity, the win or loss of SD-WAN related business can tied to way the companies align their selling and operational strategies.
In a recent video interview with Light Reading, Netcracker’s Ari Banerjee highlighted three areas that CSPs must address to succeed in SD-WAN, the first and foremost being a lack of automation. If CSPs want to help a business scale connectivity to hundreds or to thousands of sites, manual provisioning simply won’t be able to accommodate it. Therefore, a refreshed OSS strategy that focuses on automated provisioning and orchestration is needed to eliminate those issues. Second: CSPs can win with the salience of a high value bundle. As mentioned above, CSPs are the primary provider of voice, video, data, cloud and other enterprise specific services. Adding SD-WAN to those service bundles creates service stickiness, even in the wake of potential displacement of MPLS. On note, however, successful bundling is dependent on the previous area of automation; bundles that are a mix of automated and siloed operational functions simply won’t work. Lastly, account management processes within the CSP should be revised, ensuring dedicated account reps have the ability to go deep into specific customer accounts, learn more about business needs and create the best fit for each customer.
Click here to learn more about Netcracker’s perspective on how CSPs can succeed in SD-WAN service delivery and become the B2B service provider of choice.