Alibaba Cloud has tapped Silicon Valley’s Aryaka to provide fully managed SD-WAN services to its customers inside and outside China. This is the first global SD-WAN partnership for China’s largest public cloud provider.
Aryaka CMO Shashi Kiran told FierceTelecom the company has 3-4 points of presence in China, and that any knowledge worker in the country can connect to one of those POPs in 30 milliseconds or less. Kiran said Aryaka has built a global, fully meshed Layer 2 backbone, so it does not rely on multiple handoffs to various service providers. He added that Aryaka has relationships and partnerships with most public cloud providers and SAS providers, as well as direct connectivity to most of their cloud points of presence. Aryaka says its POPs are within 1-5 milliseconds of all major cloud providers.
As part of the partnership, Alibaba Cloud will offer the Aryaka SmartServices portfolio to customers around the world. This portfolio includes connectivity, application optimization, security, data analytics and normalization of different cloud providers, all offered as services. Within China, the services will be marketed by Netbank, a channel partner for both Aryaka and Alibaba.
Alibaba is the largest public cloud provider in the Asia Pacific region, and the third largest globally behind Amazon and Microsoft Azure, according to Gartner. Aryaka said that with this partnership, it now has the most comprehensive footprint into the top cloud providers – AWS, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud and Oracle, which will help it serve customers that are leveraging multiple clouds.
Aryaka, whose CEO Matt Carter is a former president of Sprint Enterprise Services, emerged as an early leader in the SD-WAN market. As recently as 2018, Aryaka and VMWare were named as the two top vendors, but now Cisco has surpassed both of them, as have Silver Peak and Versa, according to the analysts at Dell'Oro Group. Cisco is working with both AWS and Microsoft.
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Kiran said Aryaka's partnership with Alibaba will help Chinese companies who want to extend their businesses internationally to do so with seamless connectivity and services, and will offer the same benefits to global companies that are entering the Chinese market.
“The kind of applications and the scale that you see in that country as well as across the rest of Asia Pacific is an order of degree of magnitude more complex as well as more scalable compared to what we see in the rest of the world,” said Kiran. “So I believe this will be a very significant partnership for both Alibaba Cloud customers as well as Aryaka customers as well as our channel partners, to take all of that scale, complexity and customization and really allow them to experience something in a very seamless way no matter which sites or which workers are being connected.”