The Paris-based payment firm Ingenico is rapidly becoming a software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) convert. The company is using Masergy’s managed SD-WAN services and Silver Peak’s SD-WAN platform to outfit 90 Ingenico offices around the globe.

According to Jean-Marc Voelckel, CIO of Ingenico Group, the company is expanding very rapidly and plans to double its size in just three years. That growth, which will likely come through both organic growth and acquisitions, will dramatically increase the firm’s bandwidth needs.

Originally, the company used MPLS to connect its branch offices to its headquarters in France. But to meet the growing demands, Ingenico had to transform its existing IT strategy. That meant shifting to a cloud-first strategy where all applications are moved to the cloud. “This is a challenge for MPLS,” Voelckel said. “Because of the growth of the company, the bandwidth demands for the network are growing yearly at 25 percent or more.”

Currently the company has outfitted about 15 percent of its sites with SD-WAN. According to Vincent Daubard, global head of network and security, the goal is to migrate to a full IP network but not necessarily get rid of all its MPLS. In fact, he said that some sites will need to keep the MPLS connections because of certain service level agreements.  “For sites with no SLAs, we will move to broadband,” Daubard said.

Even though it will keep some of its MPLS connections, Ingenico expects to realize some significant cost savings. Daubard said that it currently expects to reduce its costs by 40 percent by removing MPLS and replacing with SD-WAN.  But not only will it save money, it will also be able to increase its bandwidth quickly as its new sites ramp up and require more capacity.

As an example, Daubard said the company had a site in Spain that was having bandwidth issues. This site had been converted to SD-WAN, so Ingenico was able to add 100 megabits of bandwidth in three days and spend less than 100 Euros. “If we had to do this with MPLS, we would have had a long delay,” he said.

Ingenico selected Masergy combined with Silver Peak for its SD-WAN after testing other candidates. Voelckel said that Masergy provided a more mature solution that fits the company’s needs. And with Ingenico’s growth, it needs to be able to deploy the technology in weeks, not months. “Now we are quicker to deliver what we want,” he said.

“The SD-WAN solution is cloud-based, and the orchestrator can push different policies on different SD-WAN boxes,” Voelckel added. “If tomorrow I need to draw up some access, Masergy will do it all.”