By Edd K. Usman
Silver Peak, a US-based provider of connectivity solutions, said it is keeping a tab on the Philippines as the company expands its business in Asia.
“I’ve been covering the Philippine market for a while, and the feedback from enterprises is that connectivity is very expensive with narrow broadband connectivity,” said Tricia Png, regional director of Silver Peak for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).
In an interview, Png pointed out that most enterprises are subscribing to an expensive multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network while many other also use relatively cheaper broadband.
On the other hand, she added, broadband providers do not have Service Level Agreement (SLA), pushing users away from placing their business-critical applications on broadband. The lady executive said her company can help customers with this concern.
“Silver Peak offers a solution to these customers by leveraging on their broadband to run applications. By the performance of the links, we are able to apply SLA, even on broadband, thus increasing efficiency and cost-saving,” said Png.
She said that with SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), this can be done in two approaches.
First one, which is more conservative, is through a hybrid, combining broadband and MPLS, which many of Silver Peak’s customers have chosen, said Png.
“With customers who trust the technology, and recognized broadband’s potential, they forgo MPLS altogether and run their applications on broadband,” she pointed out.
Silver Peak conducted a seminar in Manila about three months ago about the topic, she recalled, during which they received a lot of interest.
“A number of the attendees’ businesses often run, say 30 sites on MPLS, and are excited about what Silver Peak can offer,” she said. “We are going to be spending a lot of time in the Philippines.”
While she is based in Singapore, the company considers the 10-member “Asean a very important market, with the Philippines being one of the focus countries,” she said.
Where circuits are costly, she said, such as in a big country like the Philippines with a growing, diverse population (over 100 million presently), there is a need for a solution like SD-WAN.
Png declined to name Silver Peak’s customers in the Philippines, other than saying they have excellent channel partners network since the American company kicked off its Asian sales distribution five years ago, using a two-tier business model.
She said their Philippine customers come from mining, travel portals, power plant distribution, tourism and resorts, among others.
“First, we have value-add distribution partners which provide logistics and order fulfillment. Along with re-sellers (system integrators), and these are a very important business channels for us as they face and serve our customers directly and the re-sellers are supported by our distribution partners,” she said.
She said Silver Peak’s roadmap has always included expansion outside of the US.
“Expansion will take place in two fronts, one of which is headcount in the region to support the business, and the other on channel partners,” said Png, adding the company plans includes leveraging heavily on channels partners for growth.
Png and Silver Peak vice president for cloud service provider sales Shayne Stubbs were in Singapore recently for the 2016 Cloud Expo Asia at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Center.
Stubbs noted that enterprises are moving to the cloud for greater agility, speed, and cost-saving. “Silver Peak,” he said, “is a great bridge to the cloud.”
He described the company as “essentially the glue that helps businesses move their applications to the cloud because there are separate facilities to be bridged, such as the network, the security, users access. Silver Peak and SD-WAN are there to bridge that access and help customers get there in the most efficient way.”
Earlier, Silver Peak, “the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN (Wide Area Network) solutions,” appointed her as the firm further cemented its operations in the Asia Pacific. She worked with the company in the past.
Png, who recently rejoined Silver Peak, said there ?is no better time than now to return to the only vendor in the industry to deliver a complete SD-WAN solution.?
?Silver Peak empowers distributed enterprises to fully leverage cloud services, and intelligently connect users to mission-critical applications through virtual WANs using any combination of broadband connectivity,” she said.
