As full-service mortgage company TruHome Solutions matured and grew away from its parent company, it needed a system that would give it autonomy and prioritize its business-critical services. So it deployed Bigleaf SD-WAN.

TruHome’s main dilemma was that because it had started as a business unit of a larger company, it was relying on that company for its IT infrastructure and self-hosted telephony service. However, as it began to establish itself as a standalone enterprise it needed to build out its own back-office functions.

“We were marching down the path of becoming segregated from the parent company and that was one of the things in our way,” said John Pentlin, vice president of IT at TruHome, said of building its own operations. “We wanted to adopt full uCaaS software-defined and software-delivered telephony, and not be subject and beholden to carrier circuits at geographic locations.”

TruHome has around 200 employees, a little over half of which are dedicated to the company’s call center agents. Which means that maintaining reliable telephony was paramount to the company, Pentlin said.

Under its parent company, TruHome’s telephony was being delivered over a private MPLS connection. It has one data circuit for internet access for cloud and for access to its cloud applications, which “quickly became a non-starter” when Pentlin joined the company. “If that circuit goes down or any of the hardware behind it [goes down] we’re in pretty bad shape, we’re not going to be able to service clients in a robust way.”

TruHome had a couple of requirements that led it to select Bigleaf as its SD-WAN vendor.

Some of these requirements included: having a service that would enable prioritization of voice and a service that enabled carrier diversity so the company could have resiliency on-premises. Bigleaf also was transparent to Truhome’s firewalls, which meant it didn’t have to disrupt or redesign its firewall layer.

The company operates a number of services through cloud providers and according to Pentlin, because telephony was such a critical service for its business, the thought of putting the cloud applications and voice services across the same circuits, made TruHome “a little nervous.”

With Bigleaf, it was able to aggregate diverse carriers and prioritize traffic in order to survive outages. Currently, TruHome is using two carriers.

While Pentlin said the benefits of deploying Bigleaf have been “intangible” he did note that its fully-meshed high availability topology has brought a lot of value.

As part of its network re-build, TruHome selected a unified Communication-as-a-service (uCaaS) provider, and Bigleaf helped with the migration. Now, TruHome can tear down its old legacy network tendencies from the parent company and eliminate a lot of its network complexity.

While the company did evaluate a number of SD-WAN providers, it landed on Bigleaf because it met its needs. “We ran into at least a handful of SD-WAN providers that were really just WAN operators, they were WAN optimization, and not truly what I would consider SD-WAN, which is full-meshed aggregation,” said Pentlin. “We ran into some smoke and mirrors.”