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CloudGenix officials are looking to accelerate the adoption of the company’s software-defined WAN products through the creation of a global channel program designed to grow the ecosystem around the technologies.
The company announced the CloudGenix Partner Program Aug. 1, with officials noting that in the last eight weeks, more than 25 additional partners have joined up with the vendor. In addition, several of the new partners also are Cisco Gold Certified partners, the result of CloudGenix’s software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology being able to be used as either alongside or instead of Cisco Systems products, they said.
CloudGenix is 100 percent partner-driven, but the creation of the partner program is designed to give more support to the growing mix of channel partners.
“The reason we have record numbers of Cisco Gold Certified partners signing up is because the CloudGenix SD-WAN solution can be introduced either as the best complement to a customer’s existing Cisco network, or as a replacement for legacy Cisco WAN routers,” Robert Sexton, vice president of channel at CloudGenix, said in a statement. “This flexibility enables our partners to be at the forefront of creating a new market, while de-risking introduction of breakthrough technologies.”
CloudGenix is one of a number of vendors pushing into an SD-WAN market that IDC analysts predict will grow from less than $225 million last year to more than $6 billion by 2020, driven in large part by enterprises looking to reduce the complexity and cost of connectivity for their branch and remote offices while improving security. Gartner analysts are forecasting that while about 1 percent of enterprises currently are using SD-WAN technologies, that will increase to about 30 percent by the end of 2019.
Such trends as greater mobility, the proliferation of connected devices, the internet of things (IoT), data analytics and the cloud are fueling the demand for greater programmability, agility, scalability and affordability in enterprise networks and giving rise to such technologies as software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV).
For decades, most applications sat in the data center and connectivity with the branch was done via such transport modes as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). However, with the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based businesses like Salesforce.com and Workday, that’s changing. SD-WAN enables connectivity through less-expensive internet and broadband, and includes features that enable the network to automatically choose the best route.
SD-WANs also bring such features as encryption, zero-touch provisioning, overlay networks and subscription pricing.
Established vendors like Cisco and Riverbed Technology are building out their SD-WAN portfolios, while a growing group of smaller, pure-play vendors—like CloudGenix, Talari Networks, VeloCloud, Viptela and Glue Networks—are looking to gain traction in the space.
CloudGenix’s Instant-On Networks (ION) family of products provides what officials call an application-defined fabric that removes the need for hardware networking routers by putting routing into software. The company estimates that enterprises using ION can eliminate complex networking configurations and reduce their overall WAN costs by as much as 70 percent.