Aryaka SmartConnect vs. SD-WAN Concierge

It integrates nicely with AWS (in regions other than China). The provisioning support is pretty good.

Incentivized

The underlying product (Velocloud) is not the issue, Windstream is. Anything this company touches turns to crap.

• Relatively easily to implement

Incentivized

• Failover is easy, no single point of failure, provided you have the bandwidth.

• Support is very inconsistent, no real trouble-ticketing system when you have issues
• Very expensive for what you get
• Not much advance notification for maintenance events
• Unclear if Aryaka connectivity into China meets Chinese M.I.I.T. laws

Incentivized

• While the product may work decently once implemented, Windstream is a constant roadblock.
• Trouble issues need to be escalated before people will bother to work on them.

We didn't really evaluate many other SDWAN providers as very few operate inside of China. Our alternative was to build VPN connectivity ourselves.

Incentivized

• Enabled us to deploy infrastructure into new regions quickly
• Cost of Aryaka connections (especially in China) is excessive

Incentivized

• One outage on our main site cost over 500K in lost revenue for a day, Windstream was unapologetic for failing to set a QOS policy right during cutover.
• We needed to get a building re-wired to get the install at one location going. Windstream said, let us quote it... It took them 2 months to get us a quote that was 4x higher than a local provider. Thankfully, this didn't impact the deployment schedule.