HITT- SD WAN and SASE Solutions- July 9, 2024

Introduction
Well, your comments and questions are welcome in the chat window for our live q and a coming up after our presentation.

Today’s hit training is is focused on both SD WAN, software defined wide area networking solutions, and on SASE, secure access service edge platforms.

These technologies provide state of the art management of multiple communication paths for businesses of all sizes.

But if Ken Jennings showed up here right now, would you successfully win the Final Jeopardy question on how each of them works, how to best introduce them to your clients, how to present and demonstrate their powerful benefits of performance, scalability, security, and cost.

Featured Hit Training
I’ll take Sassy for fifty, Alex. Fear not. Today, our featured hit trading is from Telarus senior sales engineer Jason Kaufman, joined by the experts from Aryaka, Matt Frederiksen, principal solutions architect, and Mike Wall, channel sales director for the Northeast. Jason and all, welcome to the Tuesday call. How are you doing?

Doing well. How’s everything going with you guys?

Really well. Thanks. So glad we’re, running up this topic again. Been a while since we discussed it on the Tuesday call, but the market’s growing and this is so critically important.

Yeah. I think it’s, we think it’s time we get into it. Here it’s gonna be a hit.

Differentiating SD WAN and SASE
So so, yeah, first thing I wanna do is kinda get into the differentiary differentiate between SD WAN and FASE and a lot of the different Gartner terms. So we can go to the next slide. We’ll start by some of the value props that we see across the board here. So some of the things if you think of SD WAN, certain things that come to mind are, hey. How do I automatically manage a network to where I can dynamically change what priority routing and traffic do I wanna send across which connection? And all what you’re doing is building in that redundancy automatically to where somebody doesn’t have to perform any manual intervention on the site there in order to remain online.

So where is it what problems does it solve? Managing multiple path of communication. Before SD WAN was a product or a solution, what you would have to do is have a couple different Ethernet jacks right there and have to plug it in manually if something went down. Now you have a device that’s really smart that could be able to handle that type of traffic and Say, hey.

You know what? I’m not seeing traffic coming in on here, or I’m seeing packet loss, jitter, latency, something that would cause a problem to business impacting traffic. I’m gonna shift over here and use this circuit automatically to where the customer doesn’t even know anything is physically happening. So it’s really great for network redundancy.

It’s great for secure connections between users that are remote or different sites, connecting them all together or even connecting to the cloud. We’re seeing a big cloud push right now. So how you connect to there the most efficient way to where you’re not gonna have to manage all these different circuits all at the same time.

Flavors of SD WAN
Next slide.

So what different flavors do we have? Everything started with over the top. So SD WAN, SASE, all that, you just plug it into your existing circuits and it automatically recognizes how it can work, what IP addresses it needs, what speed it has access to, and everything. You just plug it in, and it can manage those directly just by being the over the top solution.

That’s the most easiest way to implement. And it all started on the bottom there as a failover mechanism to where you have your primary circuit that you plug into. You use it if it’s great and everything is dandy. But you fail over to the next one if there’s an issue with that primary circuit, and then you fail back to it once that circuit comes back online.

So that was technically SD WAN. SD WAN says, hey. You know what? I’m gonna utilize multiple circuits at the same time.

I’m gonna use some automatic distribution to say, you know what? I’m gonna use these circuits depending on what, you know, SLA is there, what quality. And failover was the first first revision of that. But now we have ways to where we can load balance between multiple circuits at the same time.

So that’s where the new new age SD WAN is. And then now we could take that to a next next steps on saying we have backbone providers. So backbone providers have built out this entire infrastructure where they have, you know, layer two, layer three connections in their own data centers to where they can prioritize and secure traffic farther in that transmission from source to destination. So if I send something to somebody else, those backbone providers are gonna have control over that data farther in that in that interaction rather than somebody that’s accelerator.

Backbone Providers and Accelerators
The accelerators are the ones that you you remember, like, the Silver Peaks, the Riverbed, and one of the cool ones, I don’t wanna take the thunder away from one of the fizzles we have with Aryaka, but what they can do is they can make that traffic way more efficient. So let’s say I send, you know, you know, I it removes the redundancy that’s built into these different files that you’re sending over the Internet. So let’s say you have a big essay. You send it to somebody that’s a hundred pages long.

You know, you wanna write that how to be, you know, how to be outsmart a cybercriminal and you send it to Jeff, he wants to make a small a small change on it to make it a little more accurate.

The accelerators are gonna say, you know what? I’m only gonna send that change back over the wire. So you’re sending a lot less data to make sure that file is sent way more efficiently.

Next slide, please.

Securing the Network
And then what what can we do on top of that? So now we’ve talked about SD WAN, multiple different flavors of it. How do we make the network more efficient? Now we’re gonna talk about how we secure it. Generally, you take the SD WAN device that would manage the entire network and then pass that traffic off to a firewall.

Now everybody wants to become more efficient and put those two products together, and that’s where we got that, the secure access service edge. That is the blend of the SD WAN technology, that fancy router, the dynamic failover, dynamic load balancing, all that stuff, and then blending it with a next gen firewall that’s on top of it. We’ll get in some of the next gen firewall features here in a little bit. But, basically, what you’re doing now is creating a single pass to where the traffic only has to go through that device once, where before it’d have to go through a firewall and a router separately, which could inherit add latency into a network or another point of failure.

So SASE is now the more efficient route to add SD WAN and firewall, And then SSE is saying, you know what? I don’t wanna have the hardware component of the the SD WAN technology on-site. I wanna rely on software to do this for me. Or I have a remote employee stack to where it doesn’t make sense to give everybody a hardware appliance.

I want them to be able to be secured no matter where they’re located. So secure service edge takes that hardware client of SASE out of the game and says, I’m gonna put in software application on my on my laptop, on my phone, on my tablet, whatever device I have, and I can connect from anywhere and that connection is gonna be secure. And it’s gonna apply all the different, mechanisms that we like of least privilege, zero trust, all those different all those different cool cool feature sets. And then network as a service says, you know what?

Somebody that has that big backbone, all I wanna do is connect to them, and I wanna rely on them to get me where I need to go. So I don’t wanna go buy this entire infrastructure that’s gonna be really expensive, really sophisticated. They already did that. I’m just gonna connect to them and write on their backbone.

Next slide.

Comparison of SASE and SSE
So here’s kind of where the differentiators look at. I wanna I always like giving a little little picture because I’m more of a visual learner. So you can see the differences between SASE and SSE.

SASE has that hardware appliance that’s on-site. So you get the network component to where you could do the WAN optimization, the the bandwidth aggregation, the, you know, the packet load balancing depending on what’s going on with the network. But then you also get that security side that blends between SASE and SSE. So the SSE, the secure service edge, is the software component of SASE where you still get, you know, the CASB functionality, the network security, the firewall as a as a service. There’s many different security features you get on that regardless which platform you use. But the core phone function I’d like you to take out from here, DAISY is the hardware component that goes on-site, and SSE is the software component that’s more flexible in any type of network.

And last but not least, I think that leads us into that sizzle that I was leading on everybody earlier with Aryaka.

Aryaka’s Service Portfolio
Thanks, Jason. Mike Well here. We’re gonna cover three things today, guys. The our service portfolio.

We’re gonna talk about the general process of that, you know, sales cycle with a partner to get an idea of how we walk through this and how we work with our partners to create that relationship and really drive home that opportunity to help them win business. And then an opportunity use case, you know, showing why Aryaka and, you you know, really get into what Jason talked about is that conversion between network and security, which is a very key component to a future state environment for most customers, if not all customers.

So the Aryaka solution, meeting customers where our focus, guys, is to really provide tailored solutions that fit any customer wherever they are in this technology state, in this network state, in this security posture, but with the ability to kind of future proof that network.

Because what customers really don’t wanna do is have to, in three years, you know, look at another vendor and go through this headache of transitioning. And it’s it’s supposed to be a journey. It’s supposed to be something that is not so painful.

So what we’ve done is we’ve created these as a service solutions to create flexibility and scalability, but still maximizing that network performance because that’s key when we’re talking about converging network and security together. So that network as a service is that SD WAN overlay. We don’t like to call it SD WAN because, again, we are more of a NAS like Jason talked about. We have our own backbone, and and it really provides that LAN acceleration.

What we’ve done is we’ve added this this security stack because we own all this stuff into our infrastructure to create a really seamless and really flexible, and really easy user experience for that SaaSy component.

And because we converge those together, the life cycle, the matrix, the portal, which is one portal for a single pane of glass, and that in house support with Aryaka really ties everything in to create this great support and end user experience.

Customer Segmentation and Solutions
What we’ve seen over this time, in in a good point that Jason made is, you know, all these markets now, what we’re seeing is SMB with more than one location is a good fit for area code as well as mid market. With the SMB and mid market, what we’re seeing, guys, is we’re seeing more of that network and security consolidation.

Two reasons. One being, you know, smaller IT staff, and they want more of a consolidation between vendors. Make it a lot easier, and they want more of a managed solution.

With that enterprise solution, they’re a bigger IT staff. You know, they are, more predominant on specific providers, and some of sometimes they like to keep that network and security components between separate providers. What we can do is we have that flexibility to be all three of these. So we want to make sure that when we’re working these opportunities with partners is we’re we can be a one size fit all, but we can also stay in our lane because, again, customers want certain aspects and maybe they are, well, you know, educated and know a product that they wanna keep.

Real quick, a standard process. And, again, this is very standard because every partner works differently. And what we wanna focus on is Aryaka aligns with partners in their processes. But uncovering opportunity, you know, essentially, the partner brings that to Telarus and, you know, they get us involved. What we like to do is really jump on a call, do an internal call, and just make sure that we’re vetting the opportunity right and we’re we’re moving forward in an opportunity that it’s a good fit.

Standard Process with Partners
The second component is, submitting the deal reg, getting, you know, making sure that it’s confirmed, making sure it’s aligned with Aryaka and and internal, and then work on next steps with the partner. Sometimes pricing, they need it real quick. Well, we have the ability to provide pricing really quick and to get to that next stage and to look at other other things.

Scheduled calls. Yep.

Sorry. Quick question on number one there. So, you know, bringing in the Telarus SE, do you guys find the process moving from steps one through six to go a little bit more efficient to get everything started bringing the Telarus SE in? You know, we provide our notes. We performed some early discovery, stuff like that.

That’s a great question. And absolutely, yes. Because with the Aryaka solution, it’s not complex, but we kind of provide the solution based on different elements.

So having that s e provide us with more documentation and more information on, like, let’s say, critical applications, stuff like that, really provides us more detail to have a very accurate pricing going into the deal. So one hundred percent yes. Matt, anything to add to that because I know you’re part of that process too.

Yeah. Absolutely. And that’s a a fantastic question because it it is about the journey of SASE. Right?

Nobody’s going to just flip on SASE overnight unless they’re greenfield. And working with the the Telarus SEs, we can really define what that future state looks like and how Aryaka or other providers fit into that.

We have that flexibility, and we we’ve also got a pretty solid rapport with most of those Telarus SEs. So we can help you fit and find where we can fit in as a as a single piece or where we can fit in as a full solution depending on the level of the customer, depending on the the long term strategy and short term need. Mhmm. Very good.

And to follow that, you know, obviously, customer calls, getting us in front of the customer is a big one. And, again, what what our focus is, guys, is to be an extension of the partner. This is a relationship, and we wanna help assist with this, you know, this opportunity cycle and help them win these deals. So we are essentially an extension of the partner’s resources, and we have dedicated resources. As you can see at the top, you know, you’ve got your channel manager, you have your sales executive, and you have your solutions architect. That’s what we call our sales engineer. And these are dedicated resources within your region, within your partner regions, where we’re all customer facing and we’re all resources to help that partner throughout this process.

Supporting Partners Through the Sales Cycle
You know? And then after we have those calls, we we we do takeaways and action items. We provide the presentation. We customize that presentation so we can really hone in on that objective of that opportunity and make sure that we stay in our lane If if it’s just an SD WAN opportunity or if it’s SD WAN security, and then we provide any other documentations after that presentation.

Our our ability and our goal is to really be responsive throughout this process and to make sure that that that partner really feels like, you know, we’re we’re dedicated to them and we’re focused on this opportunity.

We always wanna regroup, for feedback.

And, you know, from there, we can we continue that opportunity sales cycle. And our goal is to become a trusted partner, become a relationship that they can go to not only for opportunities, but as a resource, you know, such as Telarus. Like, we like when, you know, partners come to us and ask us questions if if this is a good fit or not. We like to be transparent. We we wanna make sure we sell the right stuff, but we also we we wanna be an advisor as well.

I think I put too many build outs on this, so I’m I keep clicking in and waiting for it to go to the next slide.

That’s what I get for doing it.

Is there any way you could push to the next slide?

Oh, there we go.

Opportunity Use Case
Okay. So a good opportunity use case, and this is gonna this is good information because it’s a domestic only, opportunity. You know?

Ariaka, if if if some of you may know, you know, we’ve always been looked at global international only, but we have a very big presence domestically. We have a lot of opportunities. We have great pricing, to provide customers with solutions even in that mid market or higher, SMB market. So this is an opportunity of seven location.

They are an equipment dealership vertical with an Azure instance in Ashburn, Virginia for their, cloud applications.

They were currently a Windstream customer with VeloCloud, and their pain points were essentially inconsistent account and service support, per you know, provider managed SD WAN, vendor service. And they were looking to maximize spend, but also, like, decrease the spend, but maximize that performance. They wanted a better network, And I think the reason which they didn’t realize it now and what Jason talked about, you know, previously is that transition to security, we need to have the building blocks and foundations of a solid network before we get into those components.

Objectives for Managed Solution
So objectives were, you know, obviously, they wanted more of a managed slash command solution.

They wanted that, that that ability for the service provider to help them manage this because of smaller IT staff being a smaller, you know, mid market customer. The ability to consolidate last mile services. So for those of you who don’t know that we are like an aggregator, so we can procure circuits, last mile circuits, any type from, fiber, shared fiber files to cable, four g, five g, all that good stuff. They wanted to consolidate that component, and, they wanted to keep their existing security posture, which we talked about. Again, we wanna make sure we fit in the environments, but we also educate for future state. The flexibility and responsiveness and then better user experience for cloud applications.

Flexibility and User Experience
We’re seeing a lot of customers convert to this cloud, but we’re also seeing the opposite too. So, again, Ariaca creates that flexibility to have both, you know, converting to the cloud or staying on prem. So as you can see, headquarters is based in PA with the branch offices spread out. And I wanted to kinda provide this because when we went through this presentation, guys, we focused on domestic only because this was the objective.

And as you can see, their data center in Ashburn, Virginia. So you could see our pop infrastructure and our mesh is very well, aligned with these with with the structure. And when we showed this, it really gave them a visualization of, like, hey. We’re a smaller company, but they’re giving us this enterprise style network as a service for the same price that we’re getting for this box provider solution.

And that’s the goal here, and and I think this visual really helped us and helped the customer understand, like, hey. We can be small, but we can have a robust network.

Focus on Customer’s Perception
And then when we talked a little bit about our other services, we talked about remote workers as you as you can see up on the top right, future state. Well, I mean, all of our all of our physical pops act as VPN concentrators.

In this, we talked about how we’re a global company and we have pops across the globe, and they were like, well, that’s great for, you know, our meetings with suppliers because we have leadership and and CSOs going over cross seas, and they can obviously tie into our our our global pops and access this Ashford Virginia. So they found that as like, hey. This project in Aryaka is a good fit for that future project. And then, again, when we talked about that security or unified SaaS as a service, which we like to call it, our Aryaka One Pass solution is this is where we educate the partner and this is an important thing to understand, guys, is that we have all this infrastructure built into the SD LAN already. The customer already had the security posture in place.

Incorporating Security into SD WAN
So what I mean by that is it’s already in the edge device that we support. It’s already in this pop infrastructure where you see all these teal dots. All we had to do is turn it on and enforce it. There was no install.

So they like the fact that, like, with this SaaS or security journey, they could move to this model without doing a heavy forklift. And what we showed the partner is what I showed him is, hey. Here’s the solution with security, and all we need to do is edit those components. And this was nine hundred dollars increase in their network spend.

Impact of Security Journey
And they were like, holy crap. We went from saving them money to saving them an astronomical amount when we get to this future state of security. So he the partner had that conversation with the customer, and the partner actually became an adviser for the customer. It became even more sticky, and they saw them as a much more than like, hey.

This isn’t a sale. This is a journey.

So it was it really hit home, and the partner really liked how we showed that aspect.

Matt, do you wanna add anything to that?

Yeah. Because I I think during that during that whole process, it was also important to understand that the customer had very limited actual resources. They could take on multiple projects at once. So they were kinda hamstrung.

When we first met with the partner, the partner said, no. No. We just need to do SD WAN today. They, they’re they’re dissatisfied somewhat.

They they don’t wanna continue down the road with what they’ve got. They wanna get rid of the on prem stuff. They want all these other things, and and SD WAN is kind of the first the first goal line for them to achieve. And they don’t have the time and the resources to apply the next step, which is the security piece into the SaaS even though the the long term goal is that SaaS journey.

Customer’s Resource Constraints
And so when we when we showed them, all of a sudden, we’ve done the deployment, all we have to do is deploy these these Aryaka network access points. They’re all our own proprietary stuff. Do that once.

Plug that in.

The next step of getting the assist where they needed to do it to hit that next security piece and unplug firewalls and do all those other things that they were planning on all sorts of material hours and, resources being available.

It was, let’s just turn it on. Let’s make it happen. And that kind of allayed that fear of I I don’t have the time to plan this big project.

I can’t take two projects and and stack them together, and all of a sudden, that Thanks, man.

Addressing Customer Dissatisfaction
I I saw a few questions come in. Let let’s answer these. So, first question, if if the customer has any existing circuits and existing SD WAN via another vendor such as Silver Peak, what does that installation look like for Ariaca? Replacing all circuits, replacing equipment, or just adding over the top of what they have? Great question.

It it could be options. There’s we have options. So, one, we we don’t go over the top. So we can’t manage existing Silver Peak infrastructure.

So what we could do is, yes, we could replace circuits and replace the equipment. We could replace just the equipment and leave the circuits.

So there’s there’s different levels of of being able to do that. And I’m gonna add another layer to that, question is we can also manage customer provided circuits. So if a customer is like, hey. I don’t want the headache of managing my circuits anymore. You they can offload that to Aryaka for a monthly fee, which the partners also get paid residual on, which is also key.

And we can consolidate the management piece without going through the headache of replacing the network at those sites.

So with our SD WAN solution or Aryaka solution, we cannot, manage another, SD WAN provider. And those boxes, that equipment, that’s our own proprietary equipment, guys. It is called an ANAP, which is an Aryaka network access point.

And we have depots across the world where we manufacture these in house, where we can distribute these ANAPs within three to five business days anywhere in the world.

It’s key and a very differentiator of our SD WAN solution because it’s not a VeloBox, it’s not a SonicWall.

And when you call into support, which is in house, area code batch employees, not outsourced, all they need to know, guys, is our solution. They don’t need to be a VMware level one technician, a VMware level two. Get bounced around to other technicians. Reboot this. Reboot that. These are engineers that are working directly in real time with you to solve these issues.

Integration with Existing Circuits
One more question came in.

What were the costs that went away in the security journey or some soft costs that were reduction of ROI? So as we know, the the Windstream VeloCloud solution is pretty cost effective in itself, but I think most of it came from that that legacy circuitry.

But we ended up saving, believe it or not, roughly forty percent on their cost savings, from the SD WAN.

But it went all the way almost to to double that to sixty percent when we added that security.

Really, that the the big cost savings, I think, and, Matt, correct me if I’m wrong or add your two cents. There’s more of a cost savings in that security journey than there is in that network journey. We’re we’re just seeing that more now with this convergent like Jason talked about with network and security.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Because that that security component, you know, you might be in a in a CapEx buy where you’re buying a box and then you continue to pay for licensing over time, and that can increase. In fact, most of it has increased over time, not decreased like our network spent. But, it was it was really the consolidation of everything where now you’re you’re one single provider with all the capabilities of both your network and your security collapsed into one spend with the support. And this also reduced some of their support contract from their from their MSP, because they didn’t need to go out and do additional firewall support or or other things. So there were many different components of of that savings that got factored in.

Exactly.

And and and the other big key to that is when we showed that to the partner And the customer saw it because, again, we educate educate the the partner and then the partner either allows us to do it or we educate them so they can have that conversation and build that relationship with the customer ultimately. Because, again, we that’s the point. The customer actually sped up the security project because of the savings.

Again, we can help facilitate these changes, and we’re trying to ease that journey, and we did so in this one. Another question here, and I’m gonna hand this one to Matt. I’m gonna give you this question. It says, what makes Aryaka Unified SaaS, and I know you love this question, different from other solutions?

Differentiation of Aryaka Unified SaaS
Oh, you’re on mute.

I I need to send a thank you out for that one. Yeah. The unified SaaS, it really comes down to we have thought leaders in our product management team, our engineering team, and we’ve taken a great SD WAN platform that already does the SD WAN optimization and the the high availability concentration, all those different things, and added the security features in line. We actually asked them coming from the the companies that they did, the f fives, the check Points, Pollos, all those other places where we brought in some of these thought leaders.

If you could redesign today knowing what you knew about this consolidation, what would you do differently? And that’s what they rolled out. So no longer do you have a set of network rules and security rules. You have a unified SASE solution where the network and the security play together in a uniform single architecture from one portal instead of APIs, and we aren’t taking and stacking different components of, software or hardware together, API and those together. It’s one piece of software that rides in my POP or that ANAP on prem that does all this policy enforcement and WAN acceleration, SD WAN, high availability for everything. So it’s a true single pass architecture, single provider, single vendor SaaS solution, which is what makes us truly unique.

Yeah. Exactly.

Another question, and, Matt, I’m gonna hand it to you after I answer a little bit of this. And do ANAPs automatically fail over to a new POP in the event of a failure of an original POP?

So two things for me, and then I’m gonna let Matt take the more technical stuff because he’s a smarter guy. The that edge device, that ANAP, actually is an intelligent device, not just a router. So that that ANAP has the ability to do site to site tunneling. So you don’t have to go over that area code to send traffic, for instance, geographically close.

Let’s take this picture, for example, Atlanta and Miami. We will should just go site to site if those sites are communicating because the latency is probably the same, if not better than if we went pop to pop. So there’s an ability to alleviate that component by going site to site. And then we do have the ability to do pop and I’ll let Matt talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah. I mean, we we can get into all different levels of high availability.

The ANAPs themselves, we can put and stack on each other so that they fail. So if even one has a full hardware failure, we did an unboxing a couple weeks ago with Josh and Presto that we talked more about that. I recommend looking at that. But, the the ANAPs themselves can fail over to each other. If the POP does fail, true catastrophic failure for one, the ANAP can survive on its own, unless there’s specific resources where you need the backbone, and that’s what you’re really looking for.

But we can also do a POPHA, high availability scenario, where that site can be tied to two POPs and get that resilience there if really the the requirement is maybe a cloud service provider hosted application or a SaaS application that, that you use our core to enhance because of latency or something else, and it’s just not available in that local zone where that site occurs. So there’s a lot of different, ways that we can design this. It it really is a very simple thing, but we can customize it to whatever level, that you’re gonna find with your customers.

Yep.

Technical Capabilities and Failover
Let’s be honest. It does happen. I think maybe we had a one pop go down within the last ten to fifteen years. It does happen. So we do we do like to set up that pop for more corporate or, you know you know, high, you know, locations, but we don’t visit we don’t typically see that for any type of, branch location. Another question for you, Matt. Can traffic management go down to the Wi Fi network at the customer site?

So we can we can control the the network access to the VLANs and apply east west policy and everything there.

But we we don’t do the wireless piece itself. So that would be something where we would pass off to LAN infrastructure and just acknowledge whatever network segmentation exists at that different site.

Okay. Another one for us.

I had I have had VeloClouds who were connected to the VeloCloud core, and when the core fails, the site fails. So does this so this doesn’t happen to Ariane?

Right. Yeah. Right back to that intelligent device. Yep. Yep. If if that core fail fails and we we run a very high availability core and keep in mind, it’s our own layer two backbone infrastructure and everything else. So even if there’s ISP peering outages or other stuff, that type of catastrophic failure, we’ve we’ve designed around to probably a a fifty or a sixty year event time frame.

So we’re going to be able to survive either directly through the the physical ANAP device itself, maintaining its already rule set and, definitions.

But we’ll continue to push traffic wherever we need to that way, even if we do that. And then my the the next one down there talking about a regional, I I love telling a story about a solution that we did where it’s all regional. They’re only tied to a single pot.

They don’t even technically use our core for anything but SaaS accelerated services, three sixty five, some voice services that they have through a UCaaS provider. But all of their sites are going site to site into their headquarters without even relying upon our pot, but it still provides that management layer, the high availability, and the latency from site to site is still better than the latency from site to pop to site. And so we can route traffic efficiently that way and meet the needs there.

Exactly. Jason, just wanted to, do a quick time check for you before I go on to some more, questions on here.

Acknowledgment of Audience Engagement
We’re actually pushing up against the clock a little bit, but I have to congratulate you, first of all, on the presentation and on the, discussion afterward. As you can see, we’re getting tremendous questions from, our advisers out there.

I wanna hit a couple of the other questions before we finish, but, Jason, let me bring you back in here for a second because as we introduce the discussion today and a few of the other questions have hit on this, when when we talk about these types of solutions, we’re really coming down to benefits of performance, scalability, security, and cost.

And as our advisers are looking at their client base as the opportunities that they’re uncovering, Jason asked or James asked the question earlier, what are some of the pain points that they should be looking at to attempt to address with these benefits?

Yeah. Really, it’s if if there’s any issues with communications like, a lot of the times, even if you just have a, you know, a voice or or a CCaaS application that has real time traffic, so you notice if there’s an issue on that circuit, one of the first steps we say is, hey. Let’s look at, you know, implementing some form of SD WAN or SASE on there because even you know, besides the dynamic capabilities on load balancing the traffic and making it go the most efficient way possible, it gives you visibility in what’s going on with your Internet on a real time basis to where you’re not gonna have to fight with the ISP and say, oh, they’re not seeing anything even though you’re actually recognizing something on-site there.

So if somebody’s having an issue with with their connection or they’re having issues with some form of application, whether it’s communications or it’s an ERP or CRM, or some homegrown application that relies on the Internet. If they’re having issues with it, generally, SD WAN or SASE can provide a better experience for them. Or if they’re saying, hey. We’re going through some form of we’re gonna be purchasing some companies or we wanna simplify how our network looks network looks holistically, having an SD WAN or SaaS environment minimizes how much effort is needed to manage that network ongoing or adding new locations to the network.

Just like, you know, I’m sure I’m sure Matt would agree with, if you have, you know, this this seven location dealership, let’s say they go out and purchase a two location company, adding that adding those two extra locations to the company is super easy because the core infrastructure is already set up by by Aryaka.

Exactly.

Exactly. We can have them spin off three or five business days if we needed to. Worst case I mean, if they had to go that fast. Because the network’s in place. As long as they have Internet connectivity at that location, we’d be up and running.

A couple of the other questions that came in had to do with, the impact that these solutions will have on security. And Joanne specifically asked the question about bring your own device, security issues. And then the other one that, I wanted to touch on had to do with, how this could possibly affect or be affected by the move that we’re seeing toward wireless networks and wireless fail failovers.

So the I’ll I’ll address the BYOD, and then I’ll turn over the the wireless failovers to Matt. Simple answer is is yes for the wireless failover, but I’ll let him go into more details for it. But a BYOD infrastructure where you bring either, like, your own laptop or your own, like, mobile device, like a cell phone or a tablet, for the laptop, yes. That’s where you have the software application where you get the SSD component to where you just connect to the Aryaka core and all of the security and the routing, you know, happened happens at the core level there, and you’re just basically using that as a VPN client, with some zero trust capabilities and all that.

You know, remember that slide that has all the pictures that showed what happened on SSE, you get all that capabilities, but in the Aryaka core, for the the mobile devices, you get a piece of it because you’re protecting the network capabilities of a mobile device, but you still gotta look at, you know, like, just the previous hit series where we had Stein and Graham talk about, you know, mobile device management, policy control, application control, all that stuff, that is another piece of it that you could protect a BYOD device. So it it’s better than nothing, but there’s still other things you could do as well.

Matt, what are your thoughts on the the Wi Fi? Or not the Wi Fi, the cellular battery.

I’m sorry. I I mean, on the five g, yeah, that’s something where we work with that. I mean, we prefer both for a client to either have one or two ISPs. One of them can be five g.

That’s no problem at all. Or if we need to work in a tertiary, we’ve recently, done that too where we had two primary or a primary broadband and then a five g backup, to make sure that they’ve had as they could find. So they were willing to pay for the hardened solution, so we gave them that hardened complete, package. So that worked out, and we can procure that or just go over the top of existing.

It doesn’t have to be overly complex to to shift everything at once, which is also where where we meet the customer in their journey, not kind of force them into where you have to buy a whole package with us to get everything and all the benefits all at once.

Excellent.

Yvette asked a great question here. I know you promised to answer it, in the chat, but let’s go ahead and take it here. In terms of where our advisors should be looking for some of the best opportunities, where are you seeing some of the biggest wins right now with these solutions?

And are there particular areas where Aryaka shines that our partners could, easily, see a need for your services?

Yeah. That’s a good question. And and and it and it it was focused on industries. And so I wanna, like, kinda talk a little bit about that.

We’re we’re definitely expanding very fast in other industries because of how our pricing model has changed and how we’re we’re getting into more domestic, location, you know, location or focus companies. But our our biggest vertical and always has been is manufacturing because we’re talking about, like, CAD files. We’re talking about these applications and these, that that are long haul, like, service. But what I really feel that I’m seeing a lot more is it’s less industry focused and it’s more company size focused, like SMB, mid market. Like, the verticals are kinda going away because network and security converge so much that it’s created that disruption of, like, hey, SMB and mid market really wanna focus on that conversion. But enterprise is like, hey, we wanna keep it separate. So I think we’re seeing more of a shift, less of a industry vertical, but more on a focus of what the project or what the intent for that environment infrastructure needs to be.

Terrific.

Thank you for the responses. Thanks for, the great rundown on not only Aryaka Solutions, but the state of, SD WAN and SaaS solutions in general. Jason, let me throw this back to you to kinda take us home on this. What’s the last word for our partners? What should they be looking for, and how can they apply this, as they have their client conversations in the upcoming weeks?

Yeah. First thing is, you know, just like we we hit on with the the sales process for Aryaka and everything we always recommend, you leverage your Telarus resources to help you have those conversations.

Even if it’s something on, hey, are you having issues with your unified communications platform? Or, hey, are you do you need are you paying a lot of money to manage your current network? Or are you having trouble managing it? Are you in trouble keeping the resources in order to do that?

You know, we have plenty of co management solutions that we could bring in. You know, great one today, you saw Azariaka, all the capabilities you can have there. So the customer still has key to the kingdom, but they have the resources needed to have their back in case they need some assistance. You know, we can we can help paint that picture for them and then get the necessary data in order to bring it to somebody like Ariaca to bring it home.

So, again, leverage your Telarus resources and, happy to help any way that we can.

Terrific. Jason Kaufman from Telarus. Thank you very much. Terrific presentation. Matt Fredericks and Mike Wall of Ariaka.

Appreciate you both being here. Few more questions that came in in the, chat. Those folks will all be here responding to a few more of those as we finish up today’s call. Look forward to having you all again, back on the call soon.

Thanks so much.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.