Silver Peak sees WAN optimisation lining in hybrid cloud

With Ingram appointment, vendor anticipates growth among managed services partners

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Silver Peak hopes that its recent distribution deal with Ingram Micro will help the vendor bring in up to ten new resellers with virtualisation and networking pedigrees in the coming months.

The vendor, which has only been doing business in the country since early 2011, signed Ingram as its first and sole distributor here at the end of May.

"We really have one reseller we work with right now; Asnet," says regional director, Wayne Neich. "I think if we had over the next six months three to five partners with the networking background, and three to five with a virtualisation and storage heritage, then I’d be happy. We’re not after mass distribution."

Silver Peak provides virtual and physical WAN optimisation appliances. But with the case of the disappearing box that has been transforming the reseller business across the board, Silver Peak anticipates greater opportunity for partners that manage services. The company saw Ingram Micro’s virtual infrastructure offerings from companies such as VMware, Microsoft and KVM as key to its growth in New Zealand.

"Ingram can help us achieve an objective that is core to the company," says Neich. "WAN optimisation has been somewhat dominated by solutions based on using appliance based hardware. The problem with that is only the rich people have been able to afford it."

Neich says that WAN optimisation as a service has not grown as quickly as other managed services, but in Australia, that is starting to change. Silver Peak now has four companies there managed WAN services with optimisation, he says.

Neich imagines the service model becoming more attractive to customers rethinking their hardware investement. Customers of running dedicated, optimisation appliances on premise in three-year refresh cycles may find it much more cost effective to run virtual optimisation under one-year contracts, especially as companies continue to move more and more infrastructure into the cloud.

Silver Peak has only three customers in New Zealand, but the company’s Australian partners are following that trend.

"We’re transiting through a hybrid phase," says Neich. "Some customers, the most cost conscious ones are moving very quickly to either all virtualised software based WAN optimisiation or mostly virtualised with limited hardware.

"Typically we see in datacentres that people are choosing to use virtual there and the reason they’re using the virtual there is often those datacentres have very big pipes so it’s just more cost effective to use a virtual platform at high speed than to use a hardware based platfoom."

With New Zealand’s limited number of customers shopping for bespoke, on premise solutions, Neich says Silver Peak will be relying on Ingram to attract resellers that want to add the optimisation as a service.

"We want people to be able to add value to their customers and when you start implementing virtual appliances you need someone with the knowledge and trust of the customer becasue they are not going to allow just anybody to go in and throw in another virtual machine on their core datacentre."

The company has no presence on the ground, but has engineers in Australia to provide technical support. Silver Peak will also be offering training sessions in July.