Speaker 0 | 00:00.416
All right, I am recording live now. I am on the phone with Jason Ginter at WAN Dynamics. And thanks for jumping on the phone real quick because I’m doing a, had a lot of requests from some of my people that are either on my email list or people that saw stuff online and people just asking me recently about SD-WAN stuff. So I’m doing a, basically like a three-day series on my top three vendors. And a lot of people liked that case study and the podcast that we did, Culture Eats Technology for Breakfast. So I figured I’d just ask you a couple questions real quick since the providers that I’m mainly comparing are Kato Networks, Yourself, WAN Dynamics, which is essentially you’re a big VeloCloud player, and Big Leaf Networks. And the reason why I picked those three is I use Kato for more of a global MPLS. mobile cellular phone security type of bring everything together, get around the Chinese firewall and leverage international VPNs and stuff like that. That’s primarily what I use them for. And then also accessing Azure and Amazon and other applications up in the cloud. So that’s what I use them for. That’s what I see them as a big benefit for. And then also their managed firewall piece. And then I see Bigleaf more as just a… like let’s aggregate our bandwidth and provide QoS and peer with the providers for voice over IP services. So that’s what I use Bigly for. And then I use you for MPLS replacement for MPLS, maybe a hybrid MPLS environment, you know, really like we did with Doug, you know, bringing multiple locations together, connecting locations, speeding things up. But I kind of wanted to just let you, you know, I know all the features of VeloCloud. Most of them, we did that little ninja series way back in the day, which I’m going to put in this email, but I wanted to maybe just let you speak to how you see yourself as a differentiator and the differences between your competition, right? And then maybe also the differentiators between, you know, because there’s also, hey, I could just order my VeloCloud through, you know, TPX or Windstream, and I could have my own provider. provide my SD-WAN, which to me, I think doesn’t make much sense because one of the main points of having SD-WAN is disaster avoidance. And if your provider’s network goes down, they might have a lot of people working on bringing that network back up and they may not have time to take care of you. And if their network goes down and they’re also providing your SD-WAN solution, to me, it just doesn’t make sense for numerous reasons to have your SD-WAN in the same shop as your ISP.
Speaker 1 | 02:50.152
Agree. It’s kind of like having the fox in the hen house, you know, in my opinion. I totally agree with that. And that’s one of the regions we launched Land Dynamics. And those are, I think you nailed it on a lot of the differentiators on between those. I might add, you know, a few more details to them. So, you know, let’s start with Cato. Great solution, especially like you said for international, in particular, when you need to borrow somebody’s backbone to transport your traffic. That’s their real claim to fame. That’s what they do best is that they have that. that provider backbone. I might argue you’re kind of then making Cato your MPLS provider because you’re depending on their backbone to get place to place. So if there’s ever an outage or any issues with that Cato backbone and that, that could be kind of a black hole to you and that could be, you know, challenging, but the integrated security piece is really nice to it. So they essentially would they, they integrate, you know, all of the security components together, right. into their solution. And I think a lot of folks who aren’t really married to a security platform like that, so that they can have managed their security, their WAN, all of it’s in one, one, you know, one single interface that they can, they can control all those things together. And, you know, I think from a WAN, WAN side technology, the actual overlay protocols itself, I don’t know that it’s as mature as like a VeloCloud. I think that’s one of the biggest differentiators for VeloCloud is their what’s called dynamic multi-path optimization. It’s really, really interesting. There’s actually a white paper, if anybody wants to read it, from VeloCloud on how DMPO works. And there is a ton of different mechanisms and ways that it improves performance on voice, on any real-time applications, really, and your cloud apps. And that… really works well. I think Cato has some of those elements in their solution as well, but really Cato’s like a… All-inclusive, kind of like what you said. They tie in so much of the solution. That’s really their value. Now, BigLeaf is more of a, we call it a BGP multi-homing replacement. And for those not familiar with BGP multi-homing, it’s you get your own block of IP addresses, you get your own autonomous system number, you connect to multiple ISPs, and then you broadcast your IPs to the world. And then the internet backbone knows, okay, I can see. this block of IPs for this custom, this block of publicly routable IP addresses is available via multi-paths. Well, Bigleaf is kind of smart because, you know, a lot of people want to do that, but they don’t want the overhead of running it. You need a really expensive router. You’ve got to get enough IP space to do that, which at a minimum is a slash 24 or 256 IPs. You have to, you know, do BGP traffic engineering, which is a pain in the butt. Bigleaf made that the easy button. And the way they did that is you can use any ISP you want. You get one block of IPs from Bigleaf. You can keep using the firewalls you want. You can keep running the network the same way you want to. And then they give you that block of protected IPs that, by the way, like you said, has quality of service for voice and really optimizes and load balances your traffic across multiple links really well. And in all ways, it works better than doing BGP yourself.
Speaker 0 | 06:17.900
Very simple, single block of IP addresses for multiple ISPs.
Speaker 1 | 06:23.181
You got it. Yep, it makes multi-homing over multiple paths just a snap. That’s exactly where they play. The only thing that they don’t have is a lot of the application visibility. They don’t do the tunneling for you, so you still have to do your own tunneling site to site. and private connectivity, you’ll still have to manage that yourself on your firewalls or with an alternate solution. Bigleaf wouldn’t do that for you. So that’s kind of the tradeoff. Whereas a Cato or VeloCloud from WAN Dynamics would automatically create tunnels and private connectivity when it needs to. That wouldn’t be included with the Bigleaf solution.
Speaker 0 | 07:05.201
So let’s just talk about you guys in a VeloCloud solution real quick. And the reason why… I use you so much is because you guys really provide a hand holding from start to finish a full managed service for your SDU and solutions. And it doesn’t, it’s all wrapped into your monthly price. There’s no like additional charge for this, this managed service. So I think it’s, it’s very nice. And it’s very helpful for a mid market it director that might have, you know, a two or a five person shop and 500 end users to 1000 and users that they’re serving on a daily basis. So I think that from that. perspective. It’s very, very useful. So just talk for a few seconds how you guys differentiate yourself and maybe some of the ways that you help replace MPLS networks, augment them, and really why would we go to you?
Speaker 1 | 07:54.502
Right. No, great question. So as we talked about before, we are a telco independent managed SD-WAN provider. So you let Phil pick the circuits for you and you guys figure out. From a cost perspective, which ones make the most sense for each location and what type of circuits make the most sense? We’re Switzerland when it comes to that. But when it comes to the connectivity, we obviously have some recommended best practices. Use DIA and fiber-based circuits where you can, where you can just cost justify it. Use cable broadband and DSL where you need to. And then use 4G if you can justify it as well as a… backup to the broadband or as a tertiary if you’re if you’ve got you know fiber-based internet and broadband You know as the secondary connection if you can put a third 4g the connection in there all the better really It’s an inexpensive insurance policy if you think about it, but we just manage the network over top of that connectivity So we’ll build out a bellow cloud-based SD we n manage that and integrate it with the security solution you have in place. I think that’s one of the big values of VeloCloud. If you’re married to your security solution, let’s say you’re a Palo Alto shop or you’re Fortinet or Checkpoint and you really like what that firewall does for you, then we have ways to integrate that in with a VeloCloud SD-WAN solution. So the ability to integrate with existing networks that you’re happy with and existing security solutions that you’re happy with and just change the WAN. And leverage that dynamic multi-path optimization and, you know, that includes forward error correction and jitter buffering and all those things that improves voice performance and application performance.
Speaker 0 | 09:39.870
Application stacking and all that stuff that I’m just going to append all those little videos that we did that kind of go over each individual, you know, each individual piece. Unless there’s something that you remember in the past that we didn’t touch on that has come up in the last two years that needs to be spoken about.
Speaker 1 | 09:56.064
Not really. No, the only thing is like some of the security integrations, like there’s some really close Palo Alto integration. So if you are a Palo Alto shop, there’s a lot of great ways to tie that into a VeloCloud solution. And then development since then that we’ve added for customers is a monthly report where we actually use the VeloCloud RESTful API to pull data out and tell the customer, here’s the top applications your organization has been using this month. Here’s the top talking users. on your network. So these are users that might be abusing bandwidth and that you might want to go take a closer look at. If there’s been packet loss on any of your circuits. you’ll see the top five worst performing circuits on this report. Top locations consuming the most bandwidth circuit outages. So we add on to what the ValCloud solution does, but with this custom reporting that we’ve built ourselves in-house.
Speaker 0 | 10:53.204
So the important differentiator here is because as we’re talking about this, I can see people looking at you and being like, oh, this is like hiring an MSP or this is like hiring. It’s really not because you’re just… you’re paying for the, you’re, you’re basically paying for the, either the MPLS replacement, you’re paying, you’re paying for the SD-WAN monthly services, basically what you’re paying for, which any ILEC or CELEC or telecom provider would also charge you. And then you would have to deal with their one 800 number and their knock. And I’m not saying anything against their knock. They might have some great fellow fellow cloud guys in their knock, but, um, there’s still an employee of a large. telco and you’re still calling a large telco, you know, toll free number. And then there’s all the compromising factors that we talked about earlier. So it’s important to realize that this is not like a big extra cost factor or anything. It’s just the smart way to do it.
Speaker 1 | 11:48.228
Right. And it’s completely co-managed. So customer, if you want to go in and make changes to your network because you feel comfortable doing that and you’re highly technical, go for it. If you’d rather have our engineers jump in and make the changes, either… by dropping an email or giving us a call, we can do that too. So the co-managed model we work in, you know, a lot of customers appreciate because if anybody has dealt with those large carriers on like an MPLS network, for example, and they need to make a routing change or they need to update a DHCP scope, they got to drop a ticket, wait 48 to 72 hours for that ticket to get worked, for that to get changed. And you know what I mean? It’s just,
Speaker 0 | 12:24.184
some people-It’s not nimble. It’s not nimble enough. It’s not fast enough. And the other thing is like, I just like to use this example. I mean like, what if you’re just- on vacation at the beach, which is what we’re trying to help other IT directors do more of. Yep. And you need to make a change. And you want to have a smart person that feels like a friend, that’s a team of people that feel like a friend, that are not idiots and can make changes for you very nimbly and are also, I would say, intimately knowledgeable of your network.
Speaker 1 | 12:57.110
Yes, that’s something we strive for. So we do a lot of upfront documentation of a customer’s network so that we understand it very well. So when they do call for those changes, we have some context of what the network looks like today and what needs to be done. And it’s a very high touch support experience. That’s something we strive for and that we give to our customers every day.
Speaker 0 | 13:20.002
All right. That’s awesome, man. I just wanted a quick soundbite. I have taken up enough of your time today, so I appreciate you jumping on the phone real quick. And I’ll send this out to you. Oh, also the one thing that I’m doing, and you just have to tell me yes or no to this. And that is for anyone that wants to have you maybe do a free consultation or look at their network and get on the phone and talk about what they’re replacing or whatever their existing MPLS network is. Are you willing to do that for them and do like a half hour, 45 minutes, just kind of like a. No-cost consultation to look at their network.
Speaker 1 | 13:58.031
Oh totally. Yeah. All right.
Speaker 0 | 13:59.291
Awesome Yeah, so all they have to do is put instead of I in the last series I did you just need to put when dynamics in the beard in The subject line and are you okay if I give them your email or do you want them to email anyone specifically?
Speaker 1 | 14:13.998
Um email, um, I would have an email sales at because I have Sheen Hearst on my team will probably be responsible for scheduling that. I’m not saying I won’t be involved in them. Of course, you know, I can still be involved, but he handles a lot of just, you know, the front end work of getting that set up and coordinating.
Speaker 0 | 14:31.249
Okay. So let Shane know that I’m specifically telling people the, the promo code for this is when dynamics and the beard in the subject line.
Speaker 1 | 14:40.795
Okay. I’ll let him know.
Speaker 0 | 14:41.996
So that’ll be coming through. If anyone wants to, you know, speak with you and do that initial kind of consultation. So thank you, sir. Have a great day.
Speaker 1 | 14:51.086
No problem. You too. Thanks, Phil.
Speaker 0 | 14:53.013
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 14:53.134
bye. All right. See you. Bye. Bye.
