Verizon Partners looks for revenue gold in wholesale SD-WAN

Verizon Partner Solutions (VPS), the telco’s wholesale unit, is bringing its growing SD-WAN platform to wholesale carrier customers, reflecting the company's desire to bolster its wholesale revenue mix.

As the latest addition to Verizon Partner Solution’s Virtual Network Services portfolio, the service provider said the SD-WAN solution is designed to help Verizon’s wholesale customers better control network operational costs and improve bandwidth efficiency.

While several competitive carriers and Verizon itself offer SD-WAN solutions today, making the service available on a wholesale basis could allow these companies and channel partners to quickly deliver the service to business customers.

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Businesses are using SD-WAN and other SDN-based technologies to more effectively manage network traffic and support their strategic business digital transformation goals.

Taking a page from its retail SD-WAN offering, Verizon is touting its ability to offer the wide breadth of reach via the internet with the performance qualities of a private IP network.

Verizon’s wholesale SD-WAN service includes various key elements.

Transport independence: Featuring built-in load balancing and automatic fail-over capability, the service includes IPsec overlay and traffic distribution over multiple paths.

Application optimization: Customers can get access to centralized network visibility and control, as well as QoS and bandwidth management with traffic shaping.

Intelligent path control: Policy-based routing, which assigns a traffic path based on source, destination or application; and dynamic path selection, which chooses a traffic path per-application based on loss, latency and jitter.

Other elements of the service include secure connectivity with AES encryption and centralized SDN control and policy management.

Delivering a wholesale SD-WAN service is another way Verizon Partner Solutions is likely looking to enhance the revenue mix of the unit. During the third quarter, the service provider reported Partner Solutions had $1.24 billion in revenues, down 3% year-over-year. Offering new services like SD-WAN on a wholesale business could be an opportunity to build a pipeline of new revenue opportunities.

Verizon is hardly alone in delivering a wholesale SD-WAN product.

Fellow telco Windstream began offering a similar wholesale SD-WAN service earlier this year that’s aimed at the needs of the reseller community. Like Verizon, Windstream is looking for ways to also enhance revenue opportunities in its wholesale unit which has also suffered from price compression and the migration of its customers from TDM-based services to IP.