Infovista released the most recent update to its Ipanema SD-WAN to better serve mid-market enterprises and managed service providers. The update includes additional application intelligence capabilities, a cloud-based orchestrator, session-based routing and path selection, and a cloud application database.

The company claims that its SD-WAN business has more than 450 customers globally and more than 40,000 sites deployed with Ipanema across 115 countries. According to Mike Wilkinson, chief product officer at Infovista, the company has continued to invest in SD-WAN and this update is the “latest manifestation of what we’re building in the market.”

According to IHS, Infovista was ranked No. 10 based on worldwide SD-WAN revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018. Its SD-WAN revenue dropped 5 percent from the previous quarter to $9.7 million. According to Josh Bancroft, senior research analyst at IHS, Infovista indicated that the decline was a result of prospects waiting for this latest Ipanema SD-WAN update.

Wilkinson said that while there is new money flowing into the SD-WAN space, it has become congested and is beginning to see some degree of consolidation. “Going forward with our SD-WAN, we thought we needed to go to market with something different,” he said.

For Infovista this meant looking at its existing core capabilities and then adding new capabilities based on what it was seeing in the market and customer feedback. These existing capabilities include application visibility, automatic application control, a multi-tenant management system, and dynamic WAN selection.

Wilkonson said that customers "were looking for an integrations SD-WAN solution from us. So what we did was we brought ... an integrated capability of routing, cloud-based orchestration for our various different software functions, and then we combined that with our expertise in delivering via managed service providers to bring a solution into market, which hits both the lower end of the enterprise market, plus also mid-market.” The mid-market is a new market segment for Infovista.

The updated Ipanema SD-WAN service includes the latest iteration of its application intelligence capabilities, which includes a cloud application database with a broader range of applications that Infovista can apply its visibility to, and new reporting and troubleshooting features to provide a view across the network including insights and analysis.

Infovista also added new SD-WAN routing and connectivity features, which includes multi-layered routing and security, and a new integrated SD-WAN framework that increases the deployment flexibility for its SD-WAN.

With these updates, “we have become a Layer 3 solution and we can layer application intelligence on top of that and become the complete, integrated solution for those types of customers customers,” said Wilkinson, referring to customers that are not seeing the performance they expected from switching to SD-WAN.

As part of the integrated service, Ipanema SD-WAN now delivers these features (both existing and new) as software functions, which can be run on Infovista hardware, on partner’s universal CPE (uCPE) including Cisco, and on partner virtual CPEs (vCPE) including “something like an Azure.” All of these capabilities can also be put into a third-party virtual network functions (VNF) environment.

Infovista SD-WAN can also be delivered as a VNF that adds application intelligence to uCPE platforms or even other SD-WAN platforms. Nuage Networks last year deployed Infovista’s VNF into its virtualized services platform. Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, and OneAccess are others running it on uCPE platforms.

“We’re seeing increasing amounts of MSP build in the marketplace,” said Wilkinson “Although the solutions themselves, in our opinion, are still relatively basic coming from that sort-of enterprise pedigree." Infovista service provider customers include BT, OBS, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, TeloIP, SoTel, Tech Mahindra, Vodafone, and WiPro.

As for the mid-market segment, Wilkinson said it has been adjusting its SD-WAN to meet their needs — which largely was "managing capacity in their applications extremely tightly" as they transition from MPLS (or similar) to SD-WAN.