For the last few decades, the Wide-Area Network (WAN) market has been nearly moribund. WANs are private networks that connect branch offices of large corporations, enabling them to control and secure their long-distance network connectivity without having to rely upon the public Internet.
Aside from periodic updates in networking protocols, as slower protocols like Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) gave way to the newer, but now aging Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), little innovation had been taking place in the WAN arena.
How times have changed. With the explosion of interest in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and the cloud generally, WANs are once again a hot ticket. Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) and related Virtual WAN (vWAN) technologies are rapidly maturing, and demand for them is set to explode.
Today, Riverbed Technology, one of the leading WAN optimization vendors, is throwing its hat into the SD-WAN ring with SteelConnect. Leveraging the technology Riverbed acquired by purchasing Ocedo earlier this year, SteelConnect orchestrates application delivery across hybrid WANs, remote Local Area Networks (LANs), and cloud networks.
While there are several vendors in the SD-WAN market, Riverbed’s application-defined approach separates it from the pack. “The promise of SD-WAN brings us part way toward the dream of software-defined networking,” says Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the SteelCentral, SteelHead, and SteelFusion Business Units at Riverbed Technology. “But SteelConnect’s application-defined approach takes enterprises one step further by unifying user connectivity and the cloud with business locations and data centers, making networks easy to set up and manage from one central location.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/04/26/riverbed-ups-sd-wan-ante-with-steelconnect/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Riverbed Technologies is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Riverbed Technologies.
