Not all SD-WAN Platforms are Created Equal

This is part 3 of our 5-part blog series on SD-WAN and how businesses who need to manage data and communications through Wide-Area Networks (WAN) can achieve significant benefits by introducing SD-WAN technology. Our first post on the basics of SD-WAN can be found here.

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Embracing new technologies allows companies to compete in the marketplace, delight new customers and win business while protecting existing revenues, and secure their data and organizational future. This has been the overarching reason that SD-WAN has seen such tremendous growth.

In part two of our series, we discussed the reasons for all of this. Without the benefits derived from the software defined networking (SDN), WAN networks on their own are not competitive. Companies are adopting SD-WAN to secure: cost savings, enhanced performance, better security, and flexibility. That is why virtually every WAN vendor now offers a SD-WAN platform.

We are here to declare that not all SD-WAN platforms are created equal or provide the same level of performance, cost savings, capability, or user experience. When there are so many companies in the SD-WAN arena, they all may seem to be similar. They are not, and it is often difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Turnium offers a state-of-the-art white label SD-WAN platform. With our Founder & CEO having owned multiple Service Providers prior to Turnium’s inception, we understand what is important to our partners.

This article is meant to provide facts and support logical, qualified decision-making. It is in this vein that we would like to share how Turnium’s SD-WAN outshines and out performs in the SD-WAN marketplace. Such a differentiation is needed since SD-WAN is largely undefined and all too often companies take advantage of this industry vagueness and create confusion.

Turnium believes in straight talk that clearly defines how our partners will benefit. Here are just a few of the features that our partners believe make Turnium’ SD-WAN platform the best in the field.

White Label means you are in Control: With Turnium networks, you aren’t selling our service, you’re selling your services based on an SD-WAN product that you license, manage, and control end-to-end. This allows our partners to build their own brand and offer their services to their customers, not someone else’s. This is a critical component that allows our partners to differentiate their service and increase customer retention. Some SD-WAN vendors offer turn-key solutions that actually disempower you as a service provider…selling their services exposes your customers to their sales and marketing and puts your customer traffic on their networks. Whose value are you building in this case? Not yours…you’ve become a reseller of their solution and building a long-term business model becomes more difficult.

Flexibility: Turnium’s SD-WAN platform gives you the flexibility to design and deploy the best solution for a customer at any given point in time. Use multiple containers on white-box hardware to deploy multiple services on the same hardware platform and reduce hardware costs while simplifying the network. Use customer-provided networks or Internet or add your own circuits to the mix. Deploy as many core network instances of our software as you need with unlimited licensing. Procure the hardware you want to use and brand it yourself. Own the hardware platform and margins. It’s really up to you!

Performance: This is the whole point of SD-WAN. It is supposed to improve the speed, flexibility, visibility and control over networks. Turnium’s platform delivers high performance networks that can be deployed quickly to meet the varying requirements and the applications in use at each site. Scale bandwidth, maintain sessions during circuit failure or degradation, allocate bandwidth to applications and apply QoS to ensure business critical applications continue to perform.

Reliability: Your company cannot afford to have unreliable networks. Business continuity, customer service and revenue demand network up-time. Turnium SD-WAN offers sub-second failover between circuits, and real-time visibility into the performance of the network.. This allows for higher reliability. An example of how Turnium offers a platform that is superior in reliability and performance is in brownout mitigation. In our opinion, it is critical to dynamically adjust WAN link treatments based on a link’s deteriorating conditions. Many other vendors do not seem to share the same view, as their platforms do not adapt to changing link or circuit conditions and have the ability to automatically remove and restore links based on pre-set thresholds. Competitive platforms turn links on or off and can take up to 3 minutes to failover in the event of an outage.

Can your business afford 3 minutes of an outage? We think not, and the Turnium system will not only adjust in under 300 milliseconds but enables you to be more proactive with customer service and automate dynamic changes to links if they reach pre-defined thresholds of jitter, latency, or packet loss.

Customer Service: Turnium provides our Partners with Tier 3 and 4 support. Our Partners provide Tier 1 and 2 support to their customers to ensure customer ownership and tracking of problem resolution. We provide technical support for life from the first day of the partnership and our partners love that they are supported by the engineering team that developed the software. We pride ourselves in offering customer support that is best-in-class.  

Pricing: Many SD-WAN vendors have adopted pricing models the emulate traditional telecom pricing. In other words, the more bandwidth you use, the more you pay. We don’t do that. Our model is a flexible subscription-based model that is based on per-circuit or per-site monthly fees. This structure helps our Partners manage their costs and match revenue and expense. Your costs don’t grow unless your revenues are growing!

In conclusion, we are here to declare that not all SD-WAN platforms are created equal or provide the same level of performance, cost savings, capability, or user experience. When there are so many companies in the SD-WAN arena, they all may seem to be similar.

Turnium delivers you a state-of-the-art white label SD-WAN platform that supports your business growth and brand. Deploy it to support your service delivery and reinforce your value propositions. It is both a technology and business model that gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace.