That was the view this week of Lindsay Newell, head of marketing at Nokia’s Nuage Networks at this week’s first virtual WAN Summit.
“It’s a matter of geographic availability at some locations. There may be no alternative that will deliver a reliable service,” said Newell.
Capacity Media and TeleGeography held the virtual WAN Summit this week because the live summit, due to be held in New York, has been delayed because of coronavirus.
But SD-WAN has many benefits, said John Isch, practice director of Orange Business Services, noting “the ability to impact application flows. In the SD-WAN I can see my network from the application perspective.”
Michael Kaehly, deputy CTO at Riverbed Technologies, said SD-WAN purchase decisions had become more complex. “It used to be the network teams that made the buying decisions.” But with cloud integration more people in the enterprise had become involved.
“We are seeing some growing pains. There are disparate use cases for SD-WAN,” said Kaehly. Who is the decision maker? “Those conversations are complicated.”
The full virtual WAN Summit is available here, with the session on the State of the WAN 2020 – SD-WAN and Beyond starting 47 minutes in.
One of the complexities lies in large implementations of SD-WAN, said Newell. “If we’re doing a 10-site installation we can do a flash cut-over”, but a bigger system will take longer, so IT teams have to manage a hybrid network “for a couple of years”.
Kaehly added: “Complexity in a brown-field environment is always going to be there.” He’d “love to have” green-field projects, but most customers “are migrating from a legacy system”.
There are three reports on the virtual WAN Summit:
‘No growth' in MPLS as enterprises move to DIA and broadband
SD-WAN ‘helping enterprises provide remote working' in corona virus crisis
‘No alternative’ to MPLS in some places
