Teridion SD-WAN expands to China, sparking channel business

Teridion, an internet routing platform provider, has extended its global SD-WAN offering to mainland China, filling a gap for partners that target multinational customers.

Enterprise customers today typically rely on MPLS technologies to connect with their offices located behind the Great Firewall of China, the country’s system for controlling and blocking censored content. The MPLS approach usually results in exorbitant costs and poor network performance standards, a source of pain for partners and their multinational customers alike. Teridion, through its expanded SD-WAN offering, is aiming to give organizations a way to deploy and manage their China-based locations as they would offices outside the Great Firewall.

“Up until this point, partners have had to walk away from this [China-based] business and introduce competition into their customer base, and had to forfeit that SD-WAN business to local, in-country MPLS,” said Kevin Moynahan, director of channel sales at Teridion, headquartered in San Francisco.

North Palm Beach, Fla.-based IT consulting firm 26Connect is one of those Teridion partners that struggled with the limitations of providing SD-WAN to customer sites in China. 26Connect focuses on clients in the manufacturing vertical, where many organizations have ties to the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

“I told [Teridion] I don’t think there is a whole lot for us to do if they don’t have this [mainland China extension] in place,” said Sean Dublin, president of business development at 26Connect.

Dublin said the Teridion SD-WAN in China offering will have an enormous impact on his company. “What Teridion has done here is very unique in that they are providing a proven technology to a very difficult place to connect, at a price point that feels like it’s priced in the domestic United States.”

“If the [network] user experience isn’t the same in Guangzhou as it is in San Francisco, we can fix that now,” Dublin added.

Peijman Roshan, vice president of products and marketing at Teridion, said developing the SD-WAN offering in China involved meeting China’s regulatory framework and bypassing performance issues created by the Great Firewall.

Companies must work with one of three of China’s official service providers: China Mobile, China Telecom or China Unicom. Teridion opted to work with the three providers to obtain multiple connections and then layered its cloud architecture on top of the connections, Roshan said. Teridion uses Chinese public cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent.

“With what we are doing in China … [we] have multiple connections that [we] can use, and [we] have layered our cloud architecture over the top of it, so [we] can orchestrate our cloud routers dynamically and on the fly. [We] don’t have to do a connection per customer,” Roshan said.

Teridion’s SD-WAN offering integrates with WAN, SD-WAN and security edge technologies from providers such as Cisco Meraki, Fortinet, Citrix and Palo Alto Networks. Additionally, the offering supports connectivity to legacy branch office routers and firewalls, Teridion said.

China’s regulatory and technical requirements are “an issue that plagues SD-WAN in general. … There is a tremendous amount of pent-up demand for” offerings like Teridion has introduced, Roshan added.