Uplevel draws a bead on SMBs for its SD-WAN services

Uplevel Systems is serving up an SD-WAN service that's designed for small and medium-sized business.

While SD-WAN has traditionally been targeted at large to medium-sized enterprises, it's starting to trickle down to smaller business with remote offices.

"Any business with multiple sites, or that uses Internet phone systems, stands to benefit from SD-WAN's improved performance while dramatically reducing communications costs," said Glenn Chagnot, vice president, business development for Uplevel Systems. "But despite the operational efficiencies, SD-WAN proves cost-prohibitive for smaller companies until now." 

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Uplevel Systems' gateway, wireless access point and remote management integrates firewall, SD-WAN, managed LAN and WiFi, and file storage with local and cloud backup for managed service providers (MSPs) serving customers with less than 100 employees per site. The entire platform is provided as a service, which Uplevel said eliminated extraneous and unexpected costs.

Uplevel Systems was founded to bring affordable IT services to SMBs through a network of managed service providers (MSPs.) The Uplevel solution includes Ethernet, Wi-Fi, VPNs, 1 TB storage, disaster recovery, firewall, and advanced cyber security, which are available on a subscription basis.

"Businesses often deploy voice over IP (VoIP) to gain functionality and then discover that call quality suffers when the Internet gets busy," said Chagnot. "SD-WAN solves this problem by making Internet connections more reliable, but at a price most small businesses cannot afford. The Uplevel service strips away extraneous SD-WAN cost and features to deliver exceptional call quality and resiliency at roughly a quarter 25% of the price of traditional services."

Among the SD-WAN vendors, Cisco Meraki's solution also offers services to small and medium-sized businesses.