Edgewater Networks is taking its expertise in working with the small and medium business (SMB) market to the SD-WAN arena. The company, which is best known for making session border controllers (SBC) for small businesses, has created an SD-WAN product that is part of the firm’s network edge orchestration platform.
Edgewater first announced the SD-WAN product earlier this year and it’s now enticing its enterprise clients to upgrade by exchanging their older EdgeMarc intelligent edge devices for SD-WAN capable devices.
John Marcario, SVP at Edgewater Networks, said that the company has hundreds of customers that are using the EdgeMarc device for service assurance and security for unified communications. Most customers keep their EdgeMarc devices in place for a long time — from seven to 10 years — so they are ready for an upgrade.
Customers eligible for the upgrade program must have a device from the EdgeMarc 2900, 4806, 4808, or 7000 series.
“A year ago we looked at our feature set and recognized that we had the opportunity to launch an SD-WAN product that is positioned differently than the “V” companies,” Marcario said, referring to the three big SD-WAN companies that begin with the letter V — Viptela, Versa Networks, and VeloCloud.
Specifically, Marcario said that Edgewater’s SD-WAN is geared toward smaller companies that are not looking for an MPLS replacement. Instead, these companies may have just a handful of sites but want to use SD-WAN for application priority and network resilience.
Edgewater’s SD-WAN can be used for application-based traffic steering. Marcario said the setup is handled through the cloud in the same manner that the EdgeMarc intelligent edge devices are deployed.
“Our observation is that small companies will not have a networking person. And while all the existing SD-WAN products are good products, they require technical sophistication to setup and operate,” Marcario said.
But not all Edgewater clients will be a fit for SD-WAN. Macario said that their larger customers are already working with some of the bigger SD-WAN providers. With those clients they may use Edgewater SD-WAN for service assurance for their voice services and use the other SD-WAN as an MPLS replacement. “We’ve carved out a niche,” he said. “I don’t see us competing with the others because we are addressing a different need.”