VeloCloud Talks SD-WAN at TMC Editor's Day

VeloCloud has won the largest SD-WAN deal in the world, said Mike Wood, vice president of marketing of the company during an interview at TMC Editor’s Day. The deal is with a Fortune 500 retailer, which will be using the VeloCloud solution to serve an initial 2,500 sites.

Introduced a little more than a year ago, the VeloCloud solution is a cloud-delivered SD-WAN that enables business customers to bridge a private WAN using public broadband so they can connect their branch offices.

VeloCloud offers zero-touch capability and expedited turn up. Part of the beauty of the VeloCloud solution, noted Wood, is that it supports multitenancy so the orchestrator can manage thousands of customers on a single gateway. Some competing solutions meanwhile rely on a 1:1 management model. And at around $1,000 a branch, Wood said, VeloCloud is much more affordable than investing in a new router and maintaining it over time.

SD-WAN, which takes software-defined networking concepts and expands them to wide area networks, offers more capacity than other connectivity options and is more cost effective than MPLS, Wood said.

SD-WANs, he added, are also different and better than VPNs on a number of fronts. With SD-WANs you can begin to provide prioritization over the Internet. With VPNs the connection is nailed up, and there is no connectivity to the Internet. The VeloCloud SD-WAN solution also can repair problems like packet loss across the link, he said; VPNs don’t do that. (In fact, VeloCloud recently did a proof of concept demonstration of its solution, running it as a virtual network function on the router. The PoC demoed prioritization and how the solution can address problems such as dropped calls.)

The company provides its service to enterprises, business ISPs, managed service providers, and UCaaS providers. For example, MetTel has integrated the VeloCloud SD-WAN with its core MPLS offering.

“We think MetTel is a pretty big name,” Wood said, adding VeloCloud is working with five of the top 12 service providers. “You’ll see bigger names in that space coming out.”

VeloCloud is now in the midst of its C series funding round. The company, which is the recent recipient of a 2015 Unified Communications Excellence Award, delivers its solution primarily via the channel.