An executive from CenturyLink® recently warned that even as the SD-WAN market is on the rise, it is very much important for the internet providers to set customer expectations on what the service can and cannot do to offer improved connectivity for the various applications that are based on cloud computing.
Bill Grubbs, who is the network solutions architect at CenturyLink®, said that their 18-month experience in selling SD-WAN helped them to understand that if they need success in the area, they need to make long-term relationships with their customers. Offering easy and quick fixes to their internet offload needs or cheaper connections is not just enough to be successful in the arena.
He added that SD-WAN is part of a customer network transformation, which need to be tailored carefully for it to be successful in the long run. A number of factors like the availability of resources, transportation, type of application, and the nature of the user can determine the way the service needs to be set up.
“The typical engagement starts with ‘I want to reduce the cost of my network while increasing my availability,’” Grubbs said. “The challenge when you start looking into that situation is that there is more than just that to it.” He further added that the danger here is the unrealistic user expectation, and said, “A lot of people think they’ll get 80% reduction in TCO” by switching traffic to an SD-WAN from dedicated MPLS links. “Once they have grabbed on to that, it is hard to reset expectations,” so it’s better to realize from the outset that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
A part of the long-term engagement strategy of CenturyLink® is to work with the user to make them see SD-WAN as part of a larger transformation of the networking services that they use and design them to meet the requirements of the user in a non disruptive way.
“It’s about how do I transform the customer to this new technology in a way that they are confident it is not going to disrupt them, it is not going to distract them, and they are not going to have outages, not only through that transformation but through the operational life of the technology,” Grubbs said. “The evolution to SD-WAN is exactly that. We talked about a vision of what the end state looks like but you are not going to be able to jump all the way in.”
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