Q&A With Scott Gibson Of Teneo: SD-WAN Is Taking Off

From this list, what's the best case a channel partner can make to a CIO or other technology decision maker about controlling the network?

GIBSON: We really focus on four key elements and they may or may not apply to all organizations, but they are cost, agility, performance and security. What we're finding is the security element … must be wrapped around this fully for organizations to feel comfortable moving to an SD-WAN environment. Those other elements have various weights. Some of our customers say "I don’t care what it costs; I really only care about the performance and reliability and the resiliency of the infrastructure, so that's a key piece. Certainly, there are organizations that are very cost sensitive, and the ability to leverage lower-cost infrastructure and circuits and what not to deliver SD-WAN is very compelling to them and then the agility piece is important. We're actually working with a customer right now that has an environment where they will put up sites for maybe two or three months, then they'll tear them down and move them somewhere else. So they need to be very fluid and agile in how they can deploy their infrastructure. SD-WAN gives them that flexibility that they can very easily move sites and do it without a major undertaking that [we've] traditionally seen in the networking arena.