Silver Peak has a number of other features that Verizon hopes will appeal to customers including improved management and access to cloud applications.

Kelsey Ziser, Senior Editor

December 17, 2020

3 Min Read
Verizon Business mixes Silver Peak into SD-WAN flavor profile

Verizon Business has mixed in a new flavor of SD-WAN with the addition of Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect platform.

Amit Kapoor, director of Virtual Network Services for Verizon Business, says the service provider initially launched SD-WAN services with Cisco IWAN in 2015, and later added Cisco Viptela and Versa SD-WAN services as options for enterprise customers.

Kapoor says what's appealing about Silver Peak is that it "delivers an integrated SD-WAN and WAN optimization solution," and has maintained a growing leadership position in the SD-WAN space. Silver Peak has a number of other features that Verizon hopes will appeal to customers, including improved management and access to cloud applications, "SaaS-based cloud control capabilities," and service-chained security features, adds Kapoor.

Figure 1: Verizon Business hopes to spice up its SD-WAN portfolio with the addition of Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect technology. (Source: Conscious Design on Unsplash) Verizon Business hopes to spice up its SD-WAN portfolio with the addition of Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect technology.
(Source: Conscious Design on Unsplash)

In addition to improving cloud application performance, Kapoor says that "as customers look at new ways of adopting SD-WAN, one thing that's important to them is the ability to add on the security layers such as next-generation firewalls or something more advanced."

Verizon's addition of a third SD-WAN supplier to its portfolio isn't too surprising. As the market has matured, many operators are providing multiple options of SD-WAN as a managed service for enterprise and small to midsized business customers. In July, AT&T added Cisco SD-WAN as an option due to customer demand – it's likely that customers already using Cisco technology for other networking services would request Cisco-brand SD-WAN as well.

SD-WAN market trends

In a June report, research group Dell'Oro Group ranked Silver Peak among the top SD-WAN suppliers, stating, "the top five vendors, Cisco, VMware, Silver Peak, Versa, and Fortinet saw their combined revenue share climb above 60% in 1Q 2020."

"Demand for SD-WAN held up well in the first quarter, but supply chain disruptions induced by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharper deceleration in vendor revenue growth," said Shin Umeda, vice president at Dell'Oro Group, in a statement. "We still expect the SD-WAN market to grow by double-digits this year, but with so much macroeconomic uncertainty, strong performance won't be a shoo-in for all vendors."

While Umeda predicts a rougher road ahead for some vendors, the future looks relatively rosy for Silver Peak since HPE acquired the SD-WAN supplier for $925 million this summer.

While growth in the SD-WAN market overall did take a hit, the market is still on a positive trajectory, Roopa Honnachari, industry director for Frost & Sullivan, recently told Light Reading in a podcast. "The growth rates we predicted for 2020 and the next three years were pretty high," she said. "We had to recalculate and reassess what's going to happen because of COVID."

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— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading

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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