Silver Peak tops 1,000-customer mark for its SD-WAN service

Three years after its first SD-WAN shipments, Silver Peak announced today that it now has more than 1,000 customers across 80 countries.

Today’s SD-WAN milestone included Silver Peak's enterprise customers that are served by its channel partner ecosystem and service provider end customers that work with Silver Peak. Silver Peak first rolled out its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN offering three years ago.

"A lot of these deployments are international where companies are looking at how to most effectively tie their locations together and to deliver the best quality of experience to the employees that they have out in those remote locations," Silver Peak founder and CEO David Hughes said in an interview with FierceTelecom. "With that they're accessing traditional apps in the data center, or more likely accessing apps that are posted in the cloud."

The production customer deployments have been across various market segments, from distributed enterprises with tens to hundreds of sites to businesses deploying tiered managed SD-WAN services offered by Silver Peak's service provider partners.

"We can work with service providers in multiple ways," Hughes said. "We can work with them where they're reselling our products. We also work with service providers when they want  to use our product or technology internally in order for them to offer a private-label service."

Hughes said production deployments have doubled and even tripled year over year since EdgeConnect was first launched.

"We're seeing SD-WAN move from early adopters to the mainstream," he said. "We anticipate that that kind of growth rate, doubling year-over year, is going to continue for the next couple of years. We're growing our organization in response to that very fast growing market."

RELATED: SD-WAN vendor Silver Peak snags $90M in investment round

Silver Peak announced a $90 million round of funding in June. Hughes said those funds are being used to expand Silver Peak's sales teams across the U.S., Asia and Europe. Along with VMware, which bought SD-WAN vendor VeloCloud last year, and Aryaka, Silver Peak is among the top three vendors in the red-hot SD-WAN sector.

SD-WAN companies are benefiting from an ever-growing market. SD-WAN revenue reached $162 million in this year's first quarter, which marked a 12% increase over the previous quarter, according to research by IHS Markit. IHS Markit has predicted SD-WAN revenues would reach $861 million globally this year.

The top SD WAN companies, which also include Cisco, Talari and Citrix, are increasing their bottom lines due to businesses moving away from the command line interface (CLI), device-by-device approach for enabling routers toward a business-first model in which the network empowers the business.

"I think that software-defined WAN is just really the beginning of a huge transition in WAN technology," Hughes said. "People have been doing things the same way for two or three decades with this arcane CLI, device-by-device approach. In our minds, software-defined WAN is just a step in the direction of ultimately building what we call a self-driving WAN.

"With a self-driving WAN, what you're looking at being able to do is define from the top down what you want to achieve with the network for your business. Instead of being bottom up from the devices, it's top down based on intent. Ultimately, whole idea is to deliver a better quality of experience to the users, the employees out the branch offices."