SD-WAN Providing New Service Opportunities for CSPs

SD-WAN presents telecom service providers with "another opportunity" to make inroads into the enterprise market. The question is, what are the reasons SD-WAN has become so well known and what changes must certification service providers make to offer SD-WAN?

You are my only hope, SD-WAN!

Firstly, let me apologize for the word "Star Wars" used in this blog, nonetheless, when we look at the company market, the national service provider often resembles the rebel alliance fighting the empire. With powerful and dependable software giants, significant system integrators, and ubiquitous large-scale converters or cloud providers who are trusted by so many organizations today.

In my opinion, certification service providers who want to succeed in the enterprise market should resemble an agitator alliance engaged in an attack on a Death Star.

Spoiler Warning: For any individual who has never seen the Star Wars series: IV New Hope (1977), the agitators destroy the Death Star through agility and a bold and innovative solution.

The same ability can be provided by SD-WAN to TSPs. Together, SD-WAN and SD-WAN orchestration enable portability, offering the opportunity to enhance and create new services. In many cases, the opportunity to create new income streams is one of the most significant factors driving the adoption of SD-WAN. SD-WAN is a revenue multiplier.

What is SD-WAN?

The term software-defined WAN refers to software-defined network technology across a variety of networks. SD-WAN decouples network equipment from the network control mechanism, simplifies operations and management, and enables organizations to build highly versatile WANs with less expensive and more adaptable networks.

Traditionally, big organizations connected their national and global branches with costly, dedicated multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) lines, which were highly flexible yet sometimes very slow to install.

By using SD-WAN, organizations can rapidly connect branches with broadband Internet services without the need for wired 4G/LTE or 5G connections, or MPLS when necessary. Furthermore, it allows quick versatility and the ability to create resilience.

An organization can connect a new branch office to SD-WAN instead of MPLS via a traditional business broadband link, which is much cheaper and quicker to install and can add business stability through the use of fixed wireless access (FWA) 5G connection as a backup.

Why is SD-WAN so important to businesses?

The worldwide SD-WAN revenue crossed the $1 billion mark in 2019, with site revenue and client numbers increasing by more than 100% between 2018 and 2019 (Frost and Sullivan Frostradar TM Global SD-WAN Vendor Market report - 2020).

Over the next five years, SD-WAN sales will grow rapidly, exceeding $4 billion by 2025 (Dell'Oro Group Report 24 Dec 2020). In 2020, 70% of medium and large American companies will install SD-WAN (IDC-US Enterprise Survey: SD-WAN SMB Uptake-2010), and as SD-WAN grows, it will be decreased worldwide pandemics, expected to recover rapidly.

Many CSPs offer new SD-WAN services specifically for property owners with the best in class (CPE) equipment for new clients designed for the home business market to increase the security of their network as a highly distributed building rather than a team of workers.

Ericsson, a one-tier SD-WAN service provider in North America, saw its SD-WAN connections' costs drop by 30 percent and queue execution times drop from 21 days to minutes. One of the reasons SD-WAN is an attractive use case is its cost decrease combined with further productivity improvement. The power in this one is solid (to refer back to Star Wars again).