MILPITAS, CA — (Marketwired) — 07/07/15 — ®, the leading WAN as-a-Service company, announced today that it has entered into a strategic partnership with SDN Africa to offer optimized network connectivity and application acceleration to companies in sub-Saharan Africa that access cloud services.
SDN Africa is a company founded by highly experienced telco, WAN Optimization, and SDN technology and sales executives. They plan to focus on SDN-centric technologies, especially cloud access optimization solutions, for the sub-Saharan market.
Cloud service adoption has reached a tipping point in the South African market with most medium-to-large enterprises having already adopted at least one enterprise SaaS or PaaS offering from leading providers such as Microsoft (Azure, Office 365), Amazon (AWS), Google, or Salesforce.com. Unfortunately, Sub-Saharan Africa remains geographically challenged, and therefore, businesses accessing cloud applications over the Internet encounter performance challenges. A few solutions have emerged in the market to address these performance challenges.
Microsoft Azure, for instance, has an ExpressRoute partnership in place with a few MPLS providers. Enterprises purchasing Azure ExpressRoute, however, are typically advised by suppliers to couple the solution with high-end WAN optimization. This requirement has resulted in a boom for leading vendors of WAN optimization equipment, but a hole in the pocket of the typical CIO.
“Moving to cloud services, from a networking perspective — is effectively like globalizing your business,” said Brett Steingo, CEO of SDN Africa and formerly Innovation and Technology Manager at Internet Solutions. “You suddenly have a network branch — possibly your most important branch — based in London or the US and you need to ensure optimal performance between that location and the rest of your users.”
The partnership with Aryaka provides SDN Africa customers with a cost-effective, cloud-based alternative to legacy solutions such as MPLS and WAN Optimization appliances. With Aryaka–s WAN Optimization as-a-Service, enterprises can instantly connect to any branch office location or cloud service, and benefit from enterprise-grade private connectivity with built-in WAN Optimization. By connecting to Aryaka–s POP in Johannesburg, businesses in sub-Saharan Africa can leverage optimized private connectivity to public, private, and hybrid cloud services, thus enabling better performance and higher enterprise productivity. Aryaka also has technology partnerships in place with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which enhances their cloud acceleration capabilities even further.
“Since I started investigating SDN a few years ago, I have been convinced that SDN will do to networking, what cloud-computing did to hosting. There are so many opportunities arising as a result of the evolution of SDN. We need to start taking some of the easier-to-adopt options — such as Aryaka–s WAN Optimization as-a-Service — to market, as soon as possible. With the solution proving increasing popular around the world, we are proud to be bringing this capability to the South African market,” added Steingo.
The combined power of the two companies– technology and business development assets effectively addresses the performance issues that many South African businesses face when connecting to distant cloud services, such as slow application performance, end user complaints, and unstable latency. The partnership will, thus, drive higher cloud adoption in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We are excited to welcome SDN Africa as our strategic partner in the sub-Saharan market,” said Mark Fogel, VP of Global Service Provider Alliances for Aryaka. “As cloud adoption soars in sub-Saharan Africa, and as applications continue to move outside the datacenter and into the cloud, enterprises need a software-defined WAN solution with cloud acceleration capabilities that can guarantee application performance and end user productivity. Aryaka–s optimized SD-WAN delivers this via a fully managed delivery model, with instantaneous deployment, network-wide visibility, and 24×7 world-class support. Our partnership with SDN Africa will enable us to expand our presence within the growing sub-Saharan market for cloud services.”
, the pioneer of WAN as-a-Service, delivers network optimization and application acceleration for the global enterprise, for better collaboration, communication, and business productivity. Aryaka eliminates the need for costly WAN appliances and long-haul private links. Aryaka–s groundbreaking accelerates any application to any location and provides organizations with an affordable, optimized, and fully meshed network to access on-premises applications, as well as cloud services. Aryaka–s enables globally distributed employees, customers, partners, and mobile end users to quickly access centralized enterprise applications and public-facing web resources from anywhere in the world. All services provide end-to-end visibility with 24×7 world-class support. To learn more, visit . Follow us on , , and .
SDN Africa is focused on bringing the most promising and immediately applicable software-defined networking technologies to sub-Saharan Africa.
The SDN Africa team includes engineers and domain experts with over 10 years– experience in telecommunications, software development and WAN Optimization. The company was founded in 2015 by Brett Steingo; a former partner in LayerOne Telecommunications (sold to Dimension Data in 2007, which was later acquired by NTT), Innovation and Technology Manager at Internet Solutions, and founder of myMedishare.com. SDN Africa is the exclusive representative of Aryaka in sub-Saharan Africa. The SDN Africa infrastructure, hosted at Teraco Johannesburg, interconnects to over 20 major network service providers ensuring seamless, cost-effective and optimized access for South African enterprises to Cloud Services and global network locations.
SDN Africa is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Neha More
Public Relations Manager
Aryaka
408 273 8420 Ext 2113
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