Masergy Launches ‘Game-Changing’ Feature To Boost Broadband Performance: Exclusive

‘We think that this is a huge tipping point for all of our channel partners to be much more competitive and to provide, honestly, a much better solution for almost all businesses,’ Masergy CEO Chris MacFarland tells CRN.

At a time when many employees around the global are working from their home offices or heading back to the branch office, Masergy wants to solve reliability problems that users relying on broadband often run into that act as a barrier to getting their jobs done.

The company has launched Performance Edge, a new capability that makes public broadband connections perform with close to the same reliability and service quality of a private ethernet circuit, Masergy CEO Chris MacFarland told CRN exclusively.

The patent-pending capability will serve as an add-on to Masergy’s popular SD-WAN Secure and its SASE offerings. Masergy will be relying heavily on its partner community “revolutionize” broadband access, MacFarland said.

“The impetus is really to help smaller offices have a much higher quality experience with their WAN,” he said. “It’s a long time coming for our company, because as we’ve seen managed SDN services become more widely adopted, some of the value proposition is being able to offload applications considerably quicker to SaaS vendors, so leveraging private transport and broadband connections are really a part of that emerging infrastructure.”

[Related: Masergy CEO: SD-WAN 'Only In Second Inning’ As Opportunities Peak During COVID-19]​

But often, public internet connections can experience “last mile” challenges, MacFarland said. “It really creates a challenge for offices that don‘t have dedicated access.”

Performance Edge uses proprietary network architecture from Masergy, as well as industry standard and compatible routing algorithms to give business users interruption-free productivity, the Plano, Texas-based company said. The capability can minimize packet loss and ensure packets stay in sequence over public broadband connections and reduce outages using AI-powered performance visibility, while saving customers up to 70 percent compared to the cost of a private line circuit. Sites with existing broadband connections can be connected with Performance Edge in days, according to Masergy.

“We think that this is a huge tipping point for all of our channel partners to be much more competitive and to provide, honestly, a much better solution for almost all businesses,” MacFarland said.

Master agent AVANT, a longtime Masergy partner, believes that Masergy Performance Edge will be a coveted solution among solution providers.

“Enterprises uncomfortable with the performance delivered by broadband SD-WAN connections can turn on Masergy Performance Edge and gain some peace of mind,” said Shane McNamara, executive vice president of engineering and operations for Chicago-based AVANT.

Solution providers leaning into next-gen networking solutions have been more often relying on transport mediums such as broadband, MacFarland said. For partners, Performance Edge will help them deliver new solutions and applications on predicable connections for their clients, for a low cost, he added.

An offering that Masergy has been working on since pre-pandemic days, Performance Edge has hit the market at the right time and is inspiring significant opportunities for the channel, Jim Glackin, Masergy’s senior vice president of global channel sales, told CRN.

“It’s just incredible timing. The cost effectiveness of broadband but with the near- [private connection] level of connection quality, reliability and performance — I would consider that pretty game changing. I don’t think anybody else has anything like it,” he said.

MacFarland said that Masergy is able to bring the new capability to the table thanks to the technology it’s developed and brought to market in the last 18 months, such as its AI technology. “We are absolutely a pioneer in this space,” he said.

Performance Edge will be another avenue to recurring revenue that can be added on to a SD-WAN or SASE sale, MacFarland said. “The way to think about the opportunity for channel partners is that on a per site or per connection basis, it could add, say, $100 to $200 a month of MRR to that revenue per site to our channel partners. It gives them another quiver in terms of solutions, and an option to make a little more money,” he said.

Masergy, a channel-first company that has historically done about 80 percent of its business through partners, saw this percentage climb to about 90 percent over the last year as channel partners have become even more critical in helping businesses in a post-pandemic world, MacFarland said.