Oddly enough, Talari’s latest version of its virtual SD-WAN technology got its start because of a failed IPsec deployment. John Dickey, Talari’s president and COO, in May said his good friend tried to rip out an expensive MPLS private network in India and replace it with a site-to-site IPsec virtual private network (VPN) to help a company save money. But the bandwidth was unreliable, and the IT team had no insight as to how to solve issues when they occurred.

This incident prompted Dickey to think about using multiple service providers and adding an intelligent layer to organize the traffic. Now on its fifth-generation SD-WAN product, Talari claims what makes its technology unique is that it tags every packet in one direction for Layer 2, 3, and 4 traffic, eliminating the use of an IPsec tunnel. After four rounds of funding the company has raised $36.2 million to date.

Founders: John Dickey (AMCC), Andy Gottlieb (Aryaka)

Funding: Daybreak Investments, Four Rivers Group, Menlo Ventures, Silver Creek Ventures

Founded by a team of Cisco WAN experts, CloudGenix anticipated the SD-WAN boom back in 2014. In May of that year the company raised $9 million in Series A funding so it could pursue what it called software-defined enterprise WAN (SD-WAN), which sounds an awful lot like what we know SD-WAN to be today.

In May 2015 the SD-WAN company raised $25 million in Series B funding to help scale its product, CloudGenix ION. This product provides connectivity between the ION endpoints and the CloudGenix controller. This layer is managed by the CloudGenix controller with selective peering to interoperate with the physical carrier network.

Founders: Mani Ramasamy (Cisco Systems), Kumar Ramachandran (Cisco Systems), Venkataraman Anand (Cisco), Navneet Yadav (Cisco, Juniper)

Funding: Bain Capital Ventures, Mayfield Fund, CRV

TELoIP was founded in CEO Pat Saavedra’s basement in Toronto in 2002 with a goal of providing voice, video, and data over the Internet. The company has raised $35 million since its start 14 years ago.

Today, TELoIP sells two services: SD-Internet and SD-WAN. The products are similar, except SD-WAN adds encryption to the data plane.

The company differentiates itself from the competition by selling its technology through channel partners instead of selling directly to enterprise customers. TELoIP sells through managed service providers (MSPs), and finds this alliance to be advantageous when competing against other vendors. TELoIP works with 10 channel partners, some counting sales of over $1 billion a year.

Founder: Pat Saavedra

Funding: $30 million in private funding

Best known as a Cisco partner, Glue Networks originally found its niche in software-defined network orchestration but has recently migrated into the SD-WAN space with its Gluware solution. Gluware is a platform for automating configuration of an enterprise SD-WAN in cases of a multi-vendor network.

Cisco was an early investor in Glue’s SD-WAN and resells Gluware to enterprises that want customization. In cases where equipment is interoperable, Gluware can configure an entire chain, treating the multiple vendors’ products as one workflow.

Glue Networks currently supports Riverbed’s WAN optimization, Palo Alto Networks’ firewalls, and A10’s load balancer.

Founders: Jeff Gray (Firefly Communications), Oliver Van (Firefly Education)

Funding: Harvard Angel Group, Kierestsu Forum, Sacramento Angels, Sand Hill Angels, San Joaquin Angels, Sierra Angels