China Telecom and Silver Peak have combined to deliver managed SD-WAN services to multinationals.

Kelsey Ziser, Senior Editor

June 28, 2017

5 Min Read
China Telecom Deploys Tiered Managed SD-WAN Services

China Telecom has partnered with Silver Peak to provide tiered managed SD-WAN services to multinational enterprise customers, according to a release today.

The managed SD-WAN solution, based on Silver Peak Systems Inc. Unity EdgeConnect and Unity Boost, will be delivered to China Telecom Corp. Ltd. (NYSE: CHA)'s multinational customers based in the PRC looking to expand network services within the region and globally. The managed SD-WAN technology provides security services; SaaS optimization; cloud application performance, visibility and control; secure WAN connectivity; SLA-based performance for on premise and cloud-hosted applications; and tiered WAN optimization services with Silver Peak's Unity Boost. (See Silver Peak & China Telecom Announce Global Partnership.)

“By partnering with the industry leader Silver Peak, we can accelerate growth and expand our customer base by offering cost-effective global WAN connectivity to our existing Chinese multinational clients and attract new multinational clients that seek low-cost WAN connectivity across their sites in China," said Cao Zheng, manager of network management expert business department at China Telecom Shanghai Ideal Information Industry Group, in the release.

Tiered managed SD-WAN services enable operators to deliver additional services in an automated way and derive incremental revenue from acceleration for SaaS services, WAN optimization as a service, analytics and security services, said Shayne Stubbs, vice president of service provider and cloud for Silver Peak, in an interview with Light Reading. Tiered services are the next generation of managed SD-WAN services, added Nav Chander, senior director of service provider marketing for Silver Peak.

"Tiered services -- we think that's the next evolution of managed SD-WAN services … not all services are needed for all applications and customers are different sizes and how far they reach may not require the same level of service, and we have that flexibility to take any of those applications and package them," said Chander. "For example, analytics as a service is one of those areas where service providers are trying to figure out how can they monetize and make money from that -- that's a new source of potential revenue on top of SD-WAN -- that's another value-add, higher-margin service."

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The Silver Peak Unity Orchestrator and Unity EdgeConnect are also integrated with China Telecom's NetCare unified customer network monitoring and management platform.

"NetCare is for their largest global accounts -- they probably represent 80% of global revenue," said Stubbs."We've been integrated with NetCare completely at an API level for fully automated service delivery for over nine months."

In addition to China Telecom, Silver Peak has dozens of service provider partners delivering their managed SD-WAN services including NTT Communications Corp. (NYSE: NTT), Hyundai HCN in South Korea, Masergy Communications Inc. , TeliaSonera Finland and Interoute Communications Ltd. . Silver Peak also has 450 new production customers for Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution, which are enterprise customers from direct end channels.

"Silver Peak and China Telecom's partnership has come at an opportune time as the APAC market is just beginning to embrace SD-WAN," said Roopa Honnachari, industry director of Business Communication Services & Cloud Computing Services - ICT for Frost & Sullivan , in an email to Light Reading. "The SD-WAN market has emerged out of the early adopter stage and is gaining traction, globally. Managed SD-WAN, in particular, is of immense value to enterprises as the service provider takes on the tasks of procuring, deploying and managing the hybrid network and edge devices, and ensuring application performance. In a recent Frost & Sullivan SD-WAN survey, nearly 50% of the respondents stated they would prefer to buy SD-WAN from their current network service provider or a managed service provider."

Just last week, NTT announced their global SD-WAN offering to 196 countries, which NTT claims is the largest SD-WAN service reach, and supports equipment from over ten different SD-WAN vendors. As part of this offering, NTT will provide its customers with tiered SD-WAN services from Silver Peak, said Stubbs. (See NTT Claims Largest SD-WAN Footprint.)

"Even on the heels of this China Telecom announcement, it's worth noting that NTT is an example [of a service provider partner] and announced their global offering to 190 countries and the basis of that solution is Silver Peak," said Stubbs. "So that gives us two of the top ten largest service providers in the world and I think it's fair to say that we're well engaged with all of the others that are on that list." Silver Peak expects to make additional announcements with Tier 1 operators in the US later in 2017, he added.

In regard to last week's announcement and partnership with SD-WAN vendors, Chris Davis, senior director of marketing, Americas, for NTT Communications, said in an email exchange with Light Reading, "What we see as one of the key differentiators (amongst many others) of NTT SD-WAN is the flexibility of CPE. Clients can choose for NTT to provide the CPE or to provide it themselves. In either case, our extensive experience allows NTT to support 10+ established and emerging SD-WAN technology vendors. This provides the ultimate flexibility for our clients."

China Telecom is also partnering with Westcon-Comstor, a global distributor for Silver Peak, which acts as a service delivery vehicle with on the ground presence in China to assist China Telecom with fulfillment and integration of the underlying Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Editor, Upskill U

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About the Author(s)

Kelsey Ziser

Senior Editor, Light Reading

Kelsey is a senior editor at Light Reading, co-host of the Light Reading podcast, and host of the "What's the story?" podcast.

Her interest in the telecom world started with a PR position at Connect2 Communications, which led to a communications role at the FREEDM Systems Center, a smart grid research lab at N.C. State University. There, she orchestrated their webinar program across college campuses and covered research projects such as the center's smart solid-state transformer.

Kelsey enjoys reading four (or 12) books at once, watching movies about space travel, crafting and (hoarding) houseplants.

Kelsey is based in Raleigh, N.C.

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