TelePacific goes national with SD-WAN service, challenges CenturyLink, other competitors

TelePacific is moving forward with its SD-WAN plans, announcing that it is now offering the service across its national footprint following its recent acquisition of DSCI.

After trialing SD-WAN in six of its markets, TelePacific’s nationwide SD-WAN option is now generally available for new unified communications services orders. SD-WAN will be offered as a new capability of its growing suite of UC, managed IT and managed services.

Serving as the engine for TelePacific’s offering is VeloCloud Networks, which is providing its SD-WAN solution under a long-term contract with the service provider.

Businesses that use TelePacific’s SD-WAN solution will be able to more rapidly turn up new locations, add or delete services and monitor their network performance through a single cloud-based integrated software system. 

Taking DSCI under its wing, TelePacific can immediately scale the SD-WAN offering to a broader set of business customers it would have not been able to reach before.

“What the DSCI acquisition does for this is it supercharges it and gives us a more robust unified communications solution so it allows us to bring that solution national with a product with feature functionality and do it on a national basis using the VeleCloud solution,” said Dave Zahn, SVP of marketing for TelePacific, in an interview with FierceTelecom. “We can deliver unified communications with quality and we’re providing SLAs to our customers that opted to use their own broadband connection."

Besides providing greater geographic scale, DSCI gave TelePacific a large set of business customers in the Northeast and additional unified communications, managed IT and connectivity services.

These services are being delivered through TelePacific’s new ITx services group which incorporates capabilities from TelePacific and DSCI.

These options give business customers that have multiple sites more flexibility to take advantage of SD-WAN capabilities.

A business customer has the option to either use a managed circuit from TelePacific or a broadband connection from their local telco or cable operator. TelePacific will enable SD-WAN capabilities for each customer by plugging a software programmable device into the broadband connection.

TelePacific is initially offering the SD-WAN capabilities available on its enhanced OTT capability and its UCx unified communications suite. The service provider will tie QoS guarantees onto these service suites.

“This is our broader strategy as we morph from a traditional telco to a managed services company with any services over any access mechanism,” said Jared Martin, VP of ITx Managed Services for TelePacific. “We want to provide the access where it makes sense for us to do it but we don’t want that to be a barrier to deliver the other services to those customers.”

After this device is installed, TelePacific said its cloud pushes the right configuration needed to fill the customer’s requirements to the device and, within minutes, the services are up and running.

What could set apart TelePacific’s SD-WAN offering is that it does not require complex hardware installations to get new series. Instead of using telecom hardware, services are delivered over a secure, adaptable network framework defined by software.

Additionally, TelePacific will also manage the entire end-to-end delivery, enabling it to deploy multiple continuity and security levels. This will enable TelePacific to guarantee its performance to businesses that increasingly depend on 24x7 availability for everything from customer interactions to back office functions.

Zahn said that providing a software-based solution will help it stand out from the crowded pack of providers offering SD-WAN capabilities.

“We are deploying a gateway in our network and we’re utilizing VeleCloud so we’re not dumping traffic on the customer gateway,” Zahn said. “That gives us a lot of control and allows us to manage the experience better.”

Zahn added that besides managing the service, TelePacific is advertising its SD-WAN offering as a way to enable various service sets.

“We’re looking at more of it as a Swiss army knife where it can solve lots of different problems,” Zahn said. “We’re in the MPLS business, we’re in the UC business, continuity and data center business, and SD-WAN fits right into what we already do so well already.”

For more:
- see the release

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