It’s a whole new world!

Those of you who are reading this, and are familiar with Aryaka, or are maybe reading one of our blogs for the first time, probably think of us as the ‘go-to’ company for connectivity issues that others can’t handle, such as China, or where MPLS-like performance is required for global sites.  You may also think of Aryaka as just too expensive for your smaller, less demanding sites, or for your remote workers.  Because of this, many of our existing customers use our service for their most demanding locations… maybe 10-25% of their total sites…. and leverage other vendors for their easier-to-serve branches.  But times have changed!  And true to the title, it is as if we’ve finally let the Aryaka genie out of the bottle!

Last December, we announced Aryaka Flexcore, a re-engineering of our global backbone that permits us to deliver both our traditional L2 over Fiber connectivity, but also L3 based on point-to-point IP links.  This latter service, sometimes referred to as ‘Enhanced Internet,’ and which we refer to as ‘SmartConnect EZ,’ offers our enterprise customers a more cost-effective solution for sites that would never have warranted MPLS, or for the more cloud-native enterprises who never deployed MPLS in the first place.  However, it isn’t just the internet, and we’re able to demonstrate superior performance vs leaving application traffic to the whims of the peered internet.

Next, knowing that enterprises increasingly want additional visibility and control over their application traffic, we introduced AppAssure, a totally new way for our customers to manage their tens, hundreds, or even thousands of applications.  We’ve also greatly simplified how our customers consume our services, creating a set of ‘T-shirt’ sizes that bundle almost every aspect of the service together.  You only need to know the size of a site!   Lastly, our Private Access solution for remote workers has become more and more popular.   What all of this does is set us up to address markets that we would not have in the past, notably retail.

Retail is very different from our traditional verticals that include global manufacturing, business services, or transportation and logistics.  Most sites are smaller and cost rules the day.  Deployments span thousands or even tens of thousands of sites, vs a few hundred max for our other verticals.  Due to staffing constraints, the sites must be very simple to maintain and very intuitive to operate.  All almost the opposite of Aryaka’s past.  But we’re quickly making inroads, and from all indications, this could be the next major market for our managed services.

One early example is a company based out of the U.S. Southeast with over 200 locations.  As expected, given margins in the retail space, price sensitivity was key.  However, parallel to pricing, the customer was also looking for a top-notch user experience.  They needed the flexibility, performance, and observability I mentioned earlier, and were intrigued by being able to go to a single vendor for both the technology and the service.  We were also able to demonstrate support for both their UCaaS application as well as their handoffs to Azure, the latter leveraging Aryaka’s direct L2 connectivity within our CoLos.  Ultimately, we were not the least expensive, but offered the best total value proposition, and expect to be able to replicate this approach for many other retailers in the coming months.   This is a whole new world, and we want you to join us for the journey!

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.