It’s Cool to Be a Gartner “Cool Vendor”
Founder and CDO, Versa Networks
May 9, 2016
Each year, Gartner produces a “Cool Vendor” report that spotlights innovative companies in the area of communications service provider infrastructure. This year we are honored to be included, given the strong amount of innovation occurring in the telecommunications industry.
Gartner’s recognition of Versa in this category really highlights the great strides our team has made since founding the company in 2012. I like to think we are truly transforming how managed services like SD-WAN are being built and operated to achieve unprecedented agility and profitability.
According to Gartner, Cool Vendors typically fall into two main groups. “Ones that offered a new technology or approach to better solve existing problems and others that offered innovative solutions to solve new problems. But vendors are not selected as Cool Vendors simply because they have interesting technology additional reading. It is mostly because of the growth and success of their company in using technology differently to solve customer problems resulting in tremendous traction. And innovations can go beyond technology and include new business models such as the ‘freemium’ model which was a Cool Vendor innovation.”
This year’s “Cool Vendor” in Communications Service Provider Infrastructure report, authored by analysts Akshay K. Sharma, Sylvain Fabre, Mentor Cana, Peter Liu, Kosei Takiishi and Takeshi Ikeda, says software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is emerging as an area for communications service providers (CSPs) to explore for new services. It recommends “CSP CIOs/CTOs and network planners should analyze solutions from these vendors when developing business models based on elastic, on-demand services leveraging SD-WAN, with holistic controls and service orchestration; and explore newer vCPE offerings with hybrid deployments, which offer improved resiliency, on-demand services and centralized manageability than legacy CPE.”
Gartner analyst Akshay Sharma noted, “CSPs are looking for an evolution away from siloed networking and security appliances toward fluid and dynamic solutions that support end-to-end control, along with dynamic pay-as-you-grow provision. The problems with the current technology are magnified in the WAN, because CSPs require resiliency, security and high performance with agile service delivery. The siloed solutions of the past with legacy manual provisioning are slow and prone to errors.”
We couldn’t agree more and believe the business case for our solution is clear – providers’ managed services are difficult to design and launch rapidly, as well as operate profitably. This is due to a number of factors, including the inflexibility, cost and complexity of branch customer premises equipment (CPE) and head-end devices. Software-defining the branch and head-end infrastructure via our solutions enables rapid-fire deployment of managed SD-WAN and security services, which are growing in deployments with major providers.
If you haven’t already, I urge you to request a product demo and, while you’re at it, check out the other strong innovation and vendors mentioned in the report.
