Q&A With MetTel's Ed Fox: What Users Need To Know About 3 Key Technologies

How do they wind up getting the right education? Does it create a lot of uncertainty for then to just say, "The heck with this. I don't want to do this'?" (Part 1 of 2)

I think there's uncertainty, but were seeing a shift in that lately. I'll tell you how we kind of figured that out. We chose VeloCloud (as a partner for cloud-delivered SD-WAN) close to 24 months ago. It took us quite a while to integrate it into our system because we wanted to deploy it in a certain way. Then, as we went out there, the market kind of got created by these guys, the new SD-WAN vendors themselves. They went out there first as service providers and software manufacturers. And they kind of created the environment, so there was a time when we first started doing this [when people asked] "Why do I want you, MetTel?" as opposed to going direct to VeloCloud … or whoever else.

So it took us a while to get through that, which led to [proofs of concept, or] POCs and we still have a lot of customers that we've provided services to where we might, right now, have 10 of their locations when they really have 500, and we're just getting through the POC because it took three to six months.