As you continue to evolve your portfolio to keep up with the evolution of technology, learning how to bundle next-gen technologies, such as network and Unified Communication (UC), can help you make a more organic transition to selling digital transformation solutions, which can be easier to manage and scale as you grow your business.
The combination of certain technologies can provide exponential benefits when bundled together; an example being SD-WAN, a natural fit for UCaaS to improve voice and video call quality, and provide more deployment options, efficient bandwidth use, and potentially lower costs.
Research firm IDC predicts that, over the next several years, cloud-driven solutions will present businesses with the potential to significantly improve performance or increase productivity. In addition to cost-effectiveness and quality of service, SD-WAN and UCaaS, both as-a-service solutions, allow a pay-as-you-grow model that can easily adapt to expanding teams and offices—and easily scale down during slow periods.
Here, we’ll explain six reasons why adding an SD-WAN solution to a UC sale is not about increasing your commission (though it will), it’s about creating the best value for your customer and creating an ease of business.
1. Better Routing:
SD-WAN addresses issues that contribute to lower QoS (quality-of-service) such as jitter, packet loss, and latency with dynamic traffic management across multiple network links in real-time. Some SD-WAN solutions provide both redundancy and QoS to networks and improve the quality of an organization’s connection via cloud-managed router capabilities.
2. Extra Reliability:
SD-WAN often serves as a cost-effective backup solution because it enables an active-active configuration, which enables operational continuity in case of link failure. This allows for near 100% up-times as well as superior voice and video quality.
3. Improved Security:
SD-WAN enables the security of UC solutions in several ways. Primarily, WAN segmentation, which can reduce the instances of some of the most prevalent cyber-attacks that can occur in UC systems. By isolating traffic by application, it’s also more difficult for some threats to identify and/or attack core applications. Not only does SD-WAN enable increased security protocols, but it also provides a cleaner flow for UC traffic.
4. Better Monitoring:
While emails, normal web browsing and most file transfers can handle jitter and packet loss with fairly minimal loss of productivity, with UCaaS, the same jitter and packet loss when dealing with voice or conference and video results in a noticeable slow-down of productivity and frustrates employees and customers alike. With SD-WAN, traffic prioritization can be managed so that tasks that can wait are automatically put on the back burner to highly prioritized traffic, such as a web conference or phone calls.
5. Compliance:
Together with UCaaS, SD-WAN helps to ensure that compliance regulations are met for industries such as healthcare and finance—even PCI-DS and GDPR—due to the inherent redundancy and traffic prioritization traits of the solution.
6. More Services:
Reliability and prioritization also make adding other cloud-based solutions easier without needing to increase the amount of bandwidth. This is particularly true for organizations utilizing SD-WAN in a multi-office environment.
Too often, the process of integrating new solutions into a customer’s tech environment can be slow or cause unexpected deficiencies in bandwidth or support. By bundling an SD-WAN solution with a UCaaS solution, you can deliver on the seamless connectivity, enhanced visibility, increased security and the ability to effortlessly scale to the evolving needs of your customers.
Interested in learning more about UCaaS or SD-WAN specifically? Download our e-Books on the subjects.
Have some customers in mind already? Talk to one of our solution engineers, who will help you determine the best, customized solution for your customers’ unique needs.
