On-Demand Podcast: How BCM One Fits into the SDWAN Market

Benjamin: Hello and welcome to the BCM One Podcast Series on Software-Defined Wide-Area Networks, or SD-WAN. My name is Benjamin Hunting, and today I’m speaking with Andrew D’Elia, Manager of Sales Engineering at BCM One about why SD-WAN matters to your organization. Specifically, we will be discussing how BCM One fits into the growing SD-WAN market. Andrew, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

Andrew: Very happy to be here.

Benjamin: Gartner has projected that spending on software-defined wide-area network products will rise from $129 million in 2016 to $1.24 billion in 2020. This also illustrates the findings of Frost and Sullivan, which show that the SD-WAN market has emerged out of the early adopter stage and entered the growth stage of the product lifecycle. With that in mind, how does BCM One fit into the SD-WAN market?

Andrew: Yep, our approach for SD-WAN is unique to the market. And what we set out to do is become SD-WAN agnostic. Make it all about choice and building a solution around our client’s needs. We never want to be a provider that is building solutions off of only the things that we have within our product portfolio. We want to understand our clients’ requirements, their business requirements, their technical requirements, and build a customized solution around those..

So a couple of things that we do, the gaps that we fill, as we like to say, is we don’t just pick a provider and bring that to the table for the client. We didn’t create SD-WAN. We’re going to leverage our partners that we have in the industry. And BCM One, just over time, has become very good at managing providers. So we’ve done that with voice, we’ve done that with MPLS, we’ve done that with internet, and we’re going to do that with SD-WAN, and we’re doing it with SD-WAN.

So what we add to, not…if your client goes and tries to source SD-WAN themselves, or they try to go to a service provider to get SD-WAN, we find there’s some gaps. And those gaps are one, the first thing up is the presales engineering. So that is understanding the client’s requirements and building the solution around the client. The second thing is once the decision is made as to which SD-WAN provider that will be selected to fulfill the client’s needs, is the project management. This is a critical step because you got to tie multiple moving parts together and make sure it’s managed appropriately in order to, first, meet deadlines, second, to ensure that every task along the way is fulfilled.

The next thing is the implementation support. So, the BCM One engineering staff is going to be on all of the client’s cutovers, ensuring that the SD-WAN providers are doing all the testing that was required. Making sure that the integration into the network is seamless. The next thing, also, is the billing aggregation component of it. So, with SD-WAN, this, believe it or not, becomes a bit of a hassle for clients, is with the ability to become carrier agnostic or utilizing any availability, circuit-wise, into a building, opens up a billing nightmare for clients, because now, instead of having one bill from your MPLS provider, and maybe a handful of bills for some internet connectivity at each location, you now could, potentially, have multiple bills per location, across your entire enterprise.

So, having the billing aggregation component is pretty important, and at BCM One, we’re able to take all those bills and provide a client a single bill, for your SD-WAN and your connectivity.

Benjamin: It almost feels as though BCM One offers a holistic approach to SD-WAN. It’s every single angle is covered, whereas if you were purchasing from a provider or from a carrier, you’re only going to be dealing with their narrow angle of expertise.

Andrew: You hit the nail right on the head there. So, that is exactly what we do, it’s that it’s a single place to source all of your technology needs, including SD-WAN and connectivity. And, but build a solution that actually solves the problem and not just, you know, once again, just having the single SD-WAN provider, “That’s all we have on our shelf,” and pushing it down, you know, onto our clients. That’s not how we want to do business, that’s not how we want to be seen in the business of how we’re deploying our SD-WAN solutions.

Benjamin: It also sounds as though going through BCM One instead of through a carrier or directly to a supplier, it adds agility and versatility to the SD-WAN solution that a company is looking for. Because, on your end, you’re constantly staying in touch with the state-of-the-art of this technology, and your engineering team is constantly coming up with new and better solutions for implementation. So I would think that, whereas, if you were stuck with…I hesitate to use the word “stuck with,” but with the solution that you purchase from a supplier or a carrier directly, you wouldn’t necessarily have that agility.

Andrew: Yeah and it all comes down…we’re firm believers of speaking and truly listening to our clients, right? To understand what it is that they’re doing today, as well as what are they going to be doing in the foreseeable future, three to five years, right, that planning model. Where’s their business going? Are they looking to scale? Do they have certain compliance that they need to ensure that are designed into a solution? So we look at it holistically, as you mentioned, but then we also, on our backend, what we’re doing on our product development side, is, you’re right, we’re out there, the ones, talking with all of the major SD-WAN providers out there. And that list is growing. And, you know, we want to be…have a pulse on the market itself.

And our product development team speaks with multiple SD-WAN providers, understands all their ins and outs, does the testing internally here at BCM One, to ensure that the product will live up to what it actually says it’s going to do. So, we’ll test it, and we want to make sure that anything that we’re putting our name behind, is going to solve our client’s needs. That’s one thing that we take seriously here, and we’re going to build the solutions accordingly to, once again, to meet the client’s needs.

And, you know, one of the things that we see that we’re saving clients is time invested, if you will. If they were going to go and try to do what we’ve done, by going and, basically, interviewing the SD-WAN providers, doing POCs with each of them, and vetting their solutions, they’re going to have to invest a lot of time. We’ve taken that on, we’ve done that, and we continue to do that in order to grow our product portfolio. So, we’re saving clients time, and we’re using our engineering expertise in order to build the solution for the client that will work best.

Benjamin: And I think what you just said is so important in an industry that is growing by many, many multiples of where it is now. And the number of options and solutions and choices that are out there are going to be growing right alongside that. And it’s going to be…I’m not going to use the word “confusing,” but perhaps overwhelming, in terms of trying to pick the right pathway that meets all of the things that you mentioned earlier, like compliance issues, business planning, and the actual, what the company needs to do with SD-WAN versus just simply grabbing an off-the-shelf solution.

Andrew: One hundred percent, absolutely. So that’s…once again, fits right into our motto of what we want to do, and what we set out to do and achieve with SD-WAN.

Benjamin: Andrew, thanks again for taking the time to speak with us and share your expertise on SD-WAN technologies today. If people wanted to find out more about this technology, could they go to the BCM One website and find out there?

Andrew: Absolutely, we’re here to help, and we definitely have done a lot of research and development on SD-WAN, so feel we have a really good pulse on it.