Aryaka wants to stress the “global” aspect of its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), compared to its competitors. The company is garnering customers that need to connect offices in far-flung regions of the world.

Aryaka has invested in a global private network, which it put together by buying Layer 2 capacity from Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers.

“Most corporations face an issue that users outside their core area end up with poor application performance,” says Ashwath Nagaraj, Aryaka's founder and CTO. “Aryaka tries to move the demarcation of the network much closer to the consumer.”

Aryaka combines its global private network with SD-WAN techniques.

Gary Sevounts, Aryaka’s chief marketing officer, says SD-WANs have been a boon for connecting branch offices within a specific region. An enterprise can save money on redundant MPLS connections and improve its application performance, too. “But once you traverse oceans, latency becomes unacceptable; cloud applications become so bad, it’s unacceptable,” says Sevounts.

“Companies are stitching together agreements from tens of service providers,” he adds. “They become service providers themselves. With us, we extend the SD-WAN to employees around the world.”

In some cases, traditional service providers are extending their own footprints by creating connectivity agreements with other service providers. CenturyLink, for example, is doing this for its SD-WAN service.

But when asked about CenturyLink, Nagaraj says, “What kind of footprint do they have in Hong Kong?”

One new Aryaka customer is Bajaj Electricals, a consumer equipment manufacturer based in Mumbai, India. It chose Aryaka to deliver improved network connectivity between its Indian headquarters and branch offices in China and Dubai, UAE.

Bajaj Electricals had considered using MPLS, but found that it would require expensive investments, especially in China. Yet it needed improved performance for its Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and web-conferencing applications. The high jitter and packet loss was undermining internal communications. Aryaka’s points of presence (PoPs) bring the network closer to companies such as Bajaj.

“We’re the only SD-WAN service that includes the WAN,” says Nagaraj.