Aryaka Debuts as a Strong Performer in New Forrester Wave™ for Managed SD-WAN Services

Over the past month, Forrester has released two foundational research reports covering the managed SD-WAN services space: “The Forrester Wave™: Software-Defined WAN Services, Q4 2020” and “Now Tech: Software-Defined WAN Services, Q3 2020.” This is the first year Forrester has issued a Wave in this space, speaking to the increasing maturity of the managed services model. Aryaka has a strong showing in both, listed amongst the upper revenue tier of providers in Now Tech, sharing the stage with AT&T, Verizon, Orange, and others. In the Wave, where we share coverage with nine other providers, we’re slotted as a Strong Performer with the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, Colt and Tata. This is our new world of competition, cementing our move away from the WAN Edge box vendor analyst coverage area – a shift we wholeheartedly embrace. That said, how does one looking at either of the reports make a WAN services decision, and how do we hold our own against incumbents ten times our age and, in some cases, 1000x our size?

If enterprises selected their providers on size alone, there would be no place for Aryaka. Luckily, and backed up by our strong market performance, this is not the case and we’re able to show strong differentiation vs the incumbents. First and most importantly, the traditional telco SD-WAN model is to source the technology from one or more ‘box’ vendors, resulting in a ‘split-brain’ service model where an enterprise can’t count on the provider to have intimate knowledge of their selected SD-WAN vendor(s). Aryaka, of course, does not suffer this limitation by offering a global and regional managed WAN-based on our own technology. Note that this technology sourcing is also a reason we’re not a perfect fit for the Wave because providers are credited for offering a wide set of WAN services, even though the technology is sourced from multiple SD-WAN vendors. We are therefore penalized for our singular focus.

What additional advantages does this integrated model bring to our customers? As part of an end-to-end managed service, the last mile is many times not part of the carrier service. In the rare case where last mile is offered, the customer may be locked into a small set of ISPs with whom the carrier works. In contrast, we offer true last mile management for 250+ ISPs, spanning contracting, provisioning, and monitoring. More limited geographic coverage also impacts the carrier’s ability to offer a true end-to-end global SLA in that they’d need to stitch together services from multiple providers. Aryaka’s SLAs are unique for a managed WAN provider in spanning the middle-mile, the last-mile, cloud connectivity, our security partners, and our provisioning velocity, both globally and regionally.

Next, telcos are known for their slow provisioning times, partially due to their technology vendor reliance, other times MPLS, and in other cases, having to work with other backbone providers out-of-region. This also results in diminished agility, with less of an ability to quickly adapt to their customers’ digital transformation initiatives. Carriers are also not always co-located with the different cloud service providers outside of their native regions, impacting application performance and resulting in non-optimized topologies. Aryaka’s leading CSP footprint leveraging AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Oracle Cloud is unparalleled.

From the customer perspective, carriers have not always had the best support reputations, reflected by their consistently low Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and partially due to their role as a consumer vs creator of SD-WAN technology. Though some have improved as of late, Aryaka has always maintained scores at 65+ and was recently recognized by Gartner as a Voice of the Customer. Also relating to the quality of support received is the enterprise size, with larger ones receiving additional care and feeding from the carrier. This also impacts pricing flexibility with larger customers receiving better incentives and discounts. A carrier sourcing part of their WAN from a 3rd party only adds to pricing complexity. In contrast, all Aryaka customers are important to us, be they $2500 or $250,000 MRR!

Please download the Forrester Wave and the Now Tech reports to learn more and choose for yourself!

The Forrester Wave™: Software-Defined WAN Services, Q4 2020
The Forrester Now Tech: Software-Defined WAN Services, Q3 2020

About the author

David Ginsburg

Dave is currently VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Aryaka, bringing to the company over 25 years of experience spanning corporate and product marketing, product management, digital marketing, and marketing automation. Previous marketing leadership roles included Cavirin, Teridion, Pluribus, Extreme, Riverstone Networks, Nortel and Cisco. His expertise spans networking, cloud deployments, and SaaS. Dave lives in Los Gatos with his wife, two daughters, and two dogs.