Talari President: SD-WAN Should Be A 'Small Part' Of Overall Solution Provider Offering
Talari Networks wants to blend in and become part of the overall solution that channel partners offer their end customers.
"We want you to be the heroes," John Dickey, president and co-founder of Talari Networks (pictured), told solution providers during The Channel Company's XChange 2017 conference in Orlando, Fla.
Talari, an 11-year old company, has been offering SD-WAN before it was called SD-WAN, according to Dickey. A veteran vendor in a world of start-ups, the company today has a customer retention rate of over 90 percent after three years.
When he founded the company, Dickey wanted to help partners solve quality of experience and uptime problems that were all too familiar to their customers.
SD-WAN technology can not only lower the cost of connectivity but make network management easier, too, Dickey said.
Kobargo Technology Partners, based in Surprise, Ariz., isn't yet selling SD-WAN to its customer base, but the MSP is actively evaluating the plethora of vendors and start-ups in this space to give its customers more optimization and redundancy, said George Linn, an executive at Kobargo.
Talari's longevity, he said, is a selling point. "The long-term stability of someone who has been doing this for a while is definitely a plus," he said. "Talari bringing that to the table is different than what many others are, which is also a benefit."
What SD-WAN shouldn't be is a "cookie-cutter solution," Dickey said. SD-WAN should empower a partner's overall hybrid networking solution they are bringing to their customers because if there is a problem with the last mile, customers won't be able to reach any of the other value-added services a partner may be bringing to them.
"Our primary goal is to enable services on the WAN," Dickey told partners. "We are here to enable partners' solutions and have your back, not to tell you what the solution should be."