As the demand for managed services continues to grow, MSPs will continue to enhance their service offerings to remain competitive. But, as they continue to add services, they will face an inherent increase in integration and delivery complexity – not to mention billing and management.
This is where vendors have an opportunity to help themselves and their MSPs. By developing relationships with strategically identified vendor partners, they can take some of the back-end burden off MSPs and make it easier for them to sell and deliver logically combined solutions, especially those that are often sold together, anyway. When done right, it’s a win-win-win for vendors, MSPs, and end customers.
That’s exactly what SkySwitch and Adaptiv Networks considered when entering into their strategic partnership that will enable their channel partners to more easily sell UCaaS with SD-WAN to an SMB market that is exhibiting a growing thirst for both.
The UCaaS market continues to grow and, according to Transparency Market Research, will near $80 billion in 2024 – up from just over $8 billion in 2015. The SD-WAN market also continues to show impressive growth and is projected to exceed $5 billion by 20232, a 30% CAGR from 2018, according to IDC.
But, the key to this alliance really lies in the fact that end customers are looking for both UCaaS and SD-WAN solutions, making it a logical pairing.
“The relationship creates value for all of the players in the ecosystem – Adaptiv, SkySwitch, MSPs, and end customers,” said Bernard Breton, CEO of Adaptiv Networks. “SD-WAN is a very nice complement to UCaas, providing better reliability and performance than the Internet or even MPLS would because of the redundancy of access, so this is a partnership that makes sense for everyone.”
With their alliance, SkySwitch and Adaptiv will offer MSPs with a three-pronged solution combining UCaaS with connectivity and network visibility in a unified offering, that can effectively address any customer’s needs. Along with SkySwitch’s UCaaS solution, partners will have the ability to offer one of three connectivity services through a single solution.
- SD-WAN – traditional SD-WAN solution targeting distributed organizations
- SD-Internet – Effectively an SD-WAN solution without tunneling for single-location businesses, giving them the visibility, connectivity, and QoS.
- Managed router – Still in development and expected to be released in 2020, a cloud managed router solution that delivers network visibility and real-time performance, outage, and QoS data, and can be software upgraded to SD-Internet of SD-WAN as business needs evolve.
SkySwitch CEO Eric Hernaez is bullish on the partnership, noting that the combined solution addresses the current and future needs of end customers, thus creating a greater value proposition for MSPs, who are able to start businesses with a managed router or SD-Edge solution, which can then be upgraded to SD-Internet or SD-WAN as needs evolve and businesses grow, all with just a few clicks.
“SD-WAN is required in a lot of scenarios today – there are some deals you can’t even get into if you don’t offer ii – and this allows us to remove the friction in the relationship with our resellers,” said Hernaez. “When they need an SD-WAN solution, they have the flexibility of three solutions to sell, and the can now just come into our dashboard and click a few buttons and it’s already done, with all the back-end engineering already taken care of. It really removes a barrier to entry for resellers.”
It also removes another major source of friction for MSPs and their customers, which is the need to replace on-premises devices as business needs evolve and new solutions are required. Because the solutions are software upgradable, they don’t require truckrolls to move from managed router to SD-Internet or SD-WAN.
“Our strategy is that the product has a value proposition in itself,” said Breton. “Everyone need some form of router, so if you’re going to deploy something, deploy something that is SD-WAN ready,” commented Breton.
Hernaez added that the SkySwitch network itself provides still another benefit: “Any end customer is always pointed to at least two of our switch nodes, so if a failover happens with the SD-WAN solution, it will be completely transparent to end users.”
When speaking with both Hernaez and Breton, it because clear that in addition to complementary technologies that are increasingly sought after together, the two companies share similar values and market outlooks and balanced expectations, which is at least as important as the technology itself.
“There is nothing worse than building a relationship on false expectations and promising that a product is going to perform miracles or the partner is suddenly going to start selling into a market it has never sold to.” Breton explained. “The SkySwitch relationship, from the beginning, had a great level of compatibility in terms of our shared views on the market.”
As you can imagine, both executives have high expectations for the partnership, not only because of their common views, but also because they will be bringing to market a set of products that present a unique value proposition for their partners and end users as they continue or embark on their digital transformation journeys.
SD-WAN and UCaaS will be key discussion topics at the TechSuperShow in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 12-14, 2020. With SD-WAN Expo, MSP Expo, alongside the longstanding ITEXPO and other collocated events, end users and partners alike will have access to the latest communications and networking technologies, strategies, and trends to help drive their businesses. Adaptiv Networks will be in booth #827 as a Platinum sponsor of SD-WAN Expo, ready to talk about SD-WAN and other related technologies.
Edited by
Erik Linask
