Two MSP providers found their way into Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for WAN optimization this year. While most of the vendors chosen by Gartner provide on-premises gear, two in the Magic club have serious MSP chops.
To be fair, let’s just go alphabetically, starting with A and ending with V.
Gartner’s WAN Magic Quadrant
A is for Aryaka
Aryaka, whom I had the pleasure to meet with at the recent Interop show, has its own virtual network through which it delivers WAN optimization as a service. We’ll let Gartner pick it up from here.
“The Aryaka offering is not a traditional managed device service; it provides WAN optimization embedded within Aryaka's network. By deploying WAN optimization within a network overlay model, the Aryaka WAN Optimization-as-a-Service solution often eliminates the need for on-premises appliances and can optimize both corporate network traffic and externally hosted applications within software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) deployments,” Gartner said.
This approach is particularly good for enterprises that are spread around the world, and may have difficulty optimizing each location themselves.
As always, Gartner analyses a company’s strengths and weaknesses, no matter how magic they may be.
On the upside, “Aryaka offers a simplified deployment model that includes a highly redundant and business-class network overlay with integrated WAN optimization services that largely eliminates the need for on-premises hardware and eliminates upfront capital expense for WAN optimization appliances. For locations where local loop bandwidth is limited, Aryaka provides a simple on-premises caching appliance,” Gartner said, adding that shops can also save money by going the services route.
The downside? Two come to Gartner’s mind: “Aryaka's footprint is missing some locations (specific POPs close to major SaaS and IaaS data centers) to ensure overall global performance to some regions and cloud providers. Be sure to test applications to ensure adequate performance,” the research house advised.
And there are a few gaps. “While Aryaka has strong network-based optimizations, as well as some application-specific optimizations, the solution does not cover all application environments or features of the leading appliance-based solutions. Specific gaps are around virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), storage replication and Server Message Block 3 (SMB3)/Network File System (NFS) acceleration,” Gartner said.
Aryaka recently explained its WAN optimization as a service in a video interview with MSPToday.
V for Virtela
Virtela landed in the exact same portion of the quadrant, blessed with visionary status. WAN optimization is just of Virtela’s businesses. It also has mobile device management, security, transport and managed networks.
With this range of wares, Gartner believes Virtela may be appropriate for enterprises wanting to outsource the whole wide area network shebang.
What makes Virtela magic? “Virtela provides a comprehensive product offering for enterprise branch and cloud-based (including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud [EC2], Rackspace Cloud, HP Cloud and IBM Cloud) application delivery,” Gartner said, adding that the company backs the service with performance-based SLAs.
Speed is also of Virtela’s essence. “Virtela's offering provides the ability to rapidly deploy services (in minutes) for cloud-based services in 190 countries worldwide,” Gartner said.
Moving to the negative, Virtela is not that well known, though truth be known, its service is often white labeled.
In 2010 Virtela received the Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award from TMC.
M is for Market
The overall WAN optimization market is looking pretty good. Last year, according to IDC, that market was expected to have hit $1.3 billion, and grew faster than the overall market for network gear.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
