Five reasons why a carrier agnostic SD-WANaaS can be an Agent’s best partner for selling SD-WAN as-a-Service.

SD-WAN as-a-Service

If you are a telecom Agent, you likely have experienced a situation where a carrier direct sales force prevented you from selling to their listed accounts. Most carriers have a list of global accounts that are fiercely protected by their direct sales teams. This is where carrier agnostic SD-WAN as-a-Service (SD-WANaaS) can enable agents to sell to any customers, even those identified as carrier listed accounts.

No accounts are off-limits with a carrier agnostic SD-WANaaS. Indeed, there are many reasons why they might be the right fit for Agents that want to earn recurring revenue selling fully managed SD-WAN services. Let’s explore a few.

1. Carrier Neutrality
A carrier-agnostic position means carrier diversity. This ensures the highest availability for the SD-WAN. Broadly speaking, carriers that offer SD-WAN services only use their own networks. An SD-WANaaS that delivers and manages diverse, carrier-agnostic Internet connectivity globally, including fiber, copper, broadband, 4G and line-of-site wireless, will eliminate a single source of failure.Furthermore, an independent SD-WAN service provider will deploy LAN/WAN IT professionals to install, configure and manage the SD-WAN. While carriers use telecom staff, who traditionally don’t cross the demarcation point within a building.

2. Global Cloud Gateways
A carrier agnostic SD-WANaaS that leverages cloud-based gateways globally, can deliver business applications with low latency, and easily support diverse cloud services. SD-WAN solutions that are built for the cloud will often deploy hundreds of gateways located in strategic datacenters around the country, and even throughout the world. This is in sharp contrast to carriers, who use their own points of presence (POPs) with typically much smaller footprints, and they aren’t necessarily cloud optimized.

3. Transparent SLAs
Not all network providers are equal when it comes to performance, response time, and transparently identifying and taking responsibility for performance SLAs. A carrier agnostic SD-WANaaS can create customized SLAs for your client, for all services, under one contract.

4. Carrier Diversity
A carrier diverse SD-WANaaS will design plans that leverage existing carriers – or build fiber from new carriers to ensure carrier diversity. When SD-WAN is acquired from a traditional carrier, the enterprise is limited by that carrier’s network. To insure diversity, it is up the agent or customer to find a different network service provider option, as the incumbent carrier will not bring competitors into their SD-WAN solution. As a result, they may not offer an aggressive price and optimum network design. If the carrier has an outage, your customer’s network goes down, too.

5. Network Options Without Self-Interested Limitations
If an incumbent carrier doesn’t have fiber in a customer’s new building, they may require an expensive network build. Why not use existing fiber available in that building, regardless of carrier?    Unfortunately, this puts additional burden on the customer, to manage and coordinate multiple carrier negotiations, and work with different NOCs, multiple support organizations, and separate, and often complex billings.A carrier agnostic SD-WANaaS will combine multiple transports and automate business and network policies for multiple physical and logical paths. This helps to improve application performance and eliminate outages and brown-outs from any single carrier network.

6. Carrier Neutral SD-WAN as-a-Service

A carrier agnostic SD-WANaaS can simplify application delivery infrastructure, by providing a single vendor solution for all SD-WAN and network-related services. This highly orchestrated solution can include planning, designing, negotiating multiple carrier MSAs and connections. It can also include provisioning and monitoring the entire WAN, edge-to-edge, through their global NOC. They can then simplify things further, with one multi-carrier contract, including everything within a single invoice.

About the Author

Matt Hiles is the Chief Operating Officer at Mosaic NetworX. With a successful career in the telecom and data center industries for over 20 years, he has also held executive and leadership positions at WorldCom, Level 3, and DCI Technology Holdings. Matt earned a bachelor’s degree in Government – US/Soviet Relations from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.