How Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN Helped Element Solutions Succeed with a Complex and Risky Business Transformation Initiative

As they say, business happens. Mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, expansion, and CHANGE!

All necessary, but at times quite disrupting. While the role of technology as a disruption enabler has been widely noticed, with old business models being radically disrupted by new ones with a “technology first” approach, its role as a disruption minimizer has been grossly understated.

This is one such example.

I recently had a chance to speak with Stan Yarbrough, Global Solutions Architect at Element Solutions Inc. Element Solutions is a chemical manufacturing company targeting a number of verticals. It is a large company with hundreds of globally distributed sites. Formerly known as Platform Specialty Products (PSP), Element Solutions became an Aryaka customer in 2015 as they had decided to transition from MPLS to a more Internet and cloud-centric approach.

Having successfully completed this transition in a timeframe significantly faster than they were expecting, PSP then began to aggressively implement their plan to migrate several of their on-premise applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Aryaka also enabled this transition to happen gracefully because of our direct cloud connectivity capabilities and our managed SD-WAN offering. The integrated WAN optimization capabilities were a bonus.

While this was underway, PSP decided to divest its chemicals business into a separate entity. This was a tricky situation as assets were spread out globally. It required careful planning and management to ensure the business itself wasn’t being disrupted while it was literally being split down the middle.

PSP approached Aryaka for help make this transition successful as the WAN was an extremely critical component of their strategy and operations. Aryaka partnered with PSP’s team and developed plans to plan and orchestrated this phased transition. A part of PSP, now named Arysta UPL LTD, was divested and the remaining company became Element Solutions.

While such transition can take years to plan out and successfully operationalize in traditional MPLS deployments, or in cases where there is no global expertise, this was accomplished in a matter of months with Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN offering all with zero business downtime and no service disruption.

We also ended up saving PSP and Element Solutions Inc., in their respective avatars, millions of dollars, as Stan attests. The twin benefits of faster time to market, with significantly lower TCO, in my mind made this a fascinating case study and a very interesting conversation. The high-performance network that Aryaka has built also meant that file transfers between sites are now about 20X faster than before.

Such initiatives succeed only when there is a true partnership between the customer and the vendor, where they share common goals towards making transformation a success. We’re grateful for the trust that PSP, Element Solutions and Arysta UPL LTD have thus far bestowed upon us and are very happy to see this work successfully with a “win-win” value proposition for all. Our planning architects, customer success and support teams – all take a lot of pride in this.

After this hectic period over the last year, Stan expects organic growth to continue and expects a period of stability.

Stability, we believe, is a great foundation for accelerating digital transformation.

About the author

Shashi Kiran

Shashi Kiran is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing, product management and technology partnerships. He brings over 20 years of experience in the hi-tech industry across marketing, product management, business development and partnerships.