Silver Peak has reeled in a partnership with NSC that puts its managed software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) services in front of NSC's service provider and enterprise customers.
While Silver Peak and NSC have worked with each other in the past, Silver Peak is NSC's first managed SD-WAN vendor partner. NSC is now a single source provider of Silver Peak's Unity Edge Connect SD-WAN platform.
NSC is offering Silver Peak's SD-WAN services as part of a white-label, turnkey managed platform to its Tier 0, Tier 1 and multi-national service provider customers across North America, Asia and Europe.
The Silver Peak-based managed SD-WAN services are available to NSC service provider and enterprise customers across 180 countries. Silver Peak's Edge Connect platform is deployed as a single virtual network function (VNF) on multi-purpose universal CPE (uCPE) devices that are located at sites across the customers' networks.
NSC's Mohammad Vakili, vice president, software defined services, said that while his company has worked with other SD-WAN vendors, such as Cisco's Viptela, Silver Peak kept "bubbling up" from NSC's customers.
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With Silver Peak, NSC is able to offer its customers pre-sales consulting, help with procuring the hardware and software on a purchase or lease basis, and turning up the services. Once the SD-WAN services are deployed, NSC and Silver Peak are able to offer performance monitoring, managing and reporting capabilities.
"The pre-sale is where we see a natural fit. We're not going to claim that we are more knowledgeable about this space from a SD-WAN technology specific perspective than Silver Peak," Vakili said. "The partnership with Silver Peak allows us to go to the customer to provide that pre-sale advisory and consulting. It's not just the technology; it's the total cost of ownership. So you need to convince the CTOs, but at the same time you need to convince the CFOs
"You need to convince the customer that there are two sides of the same coin. Unless you have the two sides, it's not going to go. So, that's where we see the partnership bringing value."
Silver Peak's Michael O’Brien, vice president of partner sales, said working with NSC speeds up the "quote to cash" timeframe for the SD-WAN customers.
"It's really implementing, as we like to say, a business-first wide-area network," O'Brian said. "What the service providers are looking for is a quick path to revenue. The professional resources that we can put around this are really going to help these service providers on a faster time to revenue, and to answer the questions and the concerns that their customers have.
"We see ourselves working with NSC on this SD-WAN turnkey solution and bringing that to market, but also working with them on the opportunity for advanced integration, and the ability to really help the providers integrate these solutions into their offerings quicker."
In IHS Markit's fourth quarter SD-WAN revenue rankings, Silver Peak came in fourth behind, respectively, VMware, Cisco and Aryaka Networks.