SD-WAN isn’t the Wild West anymore, says Versa CMO Mike Wood. The initial wave of “insanity” is over, businesses have wised up and are taking SD-WAN seriously.

The days of simply bolting SD-WAN capabilities on to an existing product is over, and businesses are looking critically at which vendor is going to best address their needs, according to Wood.

“You’ve got to have integrated security, you have to have the ability to integrate with the underlay technology, you have to be able to install into a brownfield environment," he said. "Nobody lifts and shifts their entire wide area network, it's always an integration strategy.”

[caption id="attachment_91032" align="alignright" width="250"] Mike Wood, CMO Versa[/caption]

Wood joined Versa’s executive team in early February after a brief stint at Apstra and three years running the marketing team at VeloCloud.

“I realized that Versa was in a phenomenal position in terms of the strength of the company,” he said, but there were “all of these great attributes of the company that weren’t being made visible.”

In fact, Versa’s SD-WAN technology earned the company visionary status in Gartner’s latest WAN edge infrastructure report, which placed the company just shy of a leadership position.

Wood says the only thing holding the company back was an ability to execute on marketing its vision.

“We’ve taken that feedback and that’s exactly what we’ve focused on is building out our [marketing] execution ability,” he said. “We are certainly one of the top vendors, but we hadn’t quite built out of our sales and marketing.”

And over the past year, Wood says Versa has done just that. The company now counts more than 100 service providers and 120 sales professionals, and Wood said the company plans to continue to grow its network of channel partners and build out its marketing team through 2020.

It's not just that businesses have gotten pickier about how they choose an SD-WAN vendor, the way they’re buying it is changing too.

Enterprises are increasingly shifting away from do-it-yourself (DIY) models — an area that Gartner has criticized Versa’s perceived lack of experience — to those delivered as managed services, according to several recent reports.

While it’s true that Versa relies heavily on managed service providers and telecom partners to reach customers, Wood said this only accounts for about half of the company’s business. The other half, contrary to Gartner’s reporting, are actually DIY deployments. “The business is split pretty equally,” he said.

As this balance tips toward managed services, as many believe it will, Wood claims Versa is ready to advantage with a software stack that is built with service providers in mind.

“When you look at other solutions it’s a serial type model. The packet comes in and it hits a firewall, then that firewall unravels, checks things, and then it passes it on to a router, and then it passes it on the SD-WAN technology,” he said.

Versa’s approach breaks this mold, integrating SD-WAN, routing, security, and other features in a way that allows the technologies to be executed independently of each other and in accordance with the company's policies.

Versa doesn’t rely on black-box appliances either. Instead, the company’s SD-WAN is designed to be hardware agnostic, capable of running on white-box hardware popular among service providers and operators because it eliminates the need to deploy multiple boxes, Wood said.

“There is a consolidation mandate that I think is underway, especially in large enterprises where they want to see all these things within one single software image and operating set,” he said.

Another factor that sets Versa apart from the competition and makes it particularly attractive to service providers is true multi-tenancy, claims Wood.

“They want to be able to put in one box and one software stack to be able to operate and deliver services to multiple customers,” he said. “That’s how these cloud providers are able to scale and that's how these service providers are able to scale.”

Multi-tenancy will become an especially important differentiator as the scope of SD-WAN expands to applications like IoT, he explained. “For example, a security camera has a much different profile than a thermostat within a business and those two need to be treated very differently,” he said.

As devices are added to the network the SD-WAN needs to be able to identify what that device is and what kind of tenancy it should have. From there, different network topologies can be applied to these devices, Wood said.

For surveillance equipment, a hub and spoke topology might be employed “because all that data has to come back to the headquarters,” he said. Meanwhile, a thermostat might require mesh topology, “because the thermostat actually needs to communicate directly with other thermostats in the building.”

This multi-tenant approach allows enterprises to more accurately apply security and quality of service policies while maintaining proper separation from core business traffic.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify some comments made by Wood.