Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs. SD-WAN Concierge

It's great for connectivity. I think if you're looking at. There's a lot of players out there that do SD- WAN, you can do hosted solutions, you can do your own. If you're looking to do it yourself, I think this product works out well. I do know it's hosted elsewhere by some other companies, but for us, we want the control and we don't have a huge amount of sites, so being able to control that's important and the data that we can get out of the product, we can see just seeing the application experience through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, really gives us good information.

Incentivized

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

• I will say the ease of use. I know it's very much a template based with feature templates and device templates when deployed properly. I truly believe that the tool can be very, very effective and actually quite robust for us to leverage for globally because we manage a lot of distribution centers and it's all over the world and a different environment in each and every location and obviously across the global markets as well. We've got a wide range of use cases and how it would be very beneficial to each of our business units that we support.

Incentivized

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

• The initial setup and configuration of the software can be somewhat complex, especially if you are not familiar with SD-WAN technology
• It has many advanced features and capabilities and as so it can be difficult to find the specific setting or option that you are looking for in the interface

• 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.

I would rate SD-WAN highly because it has significantly improved network performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for my organization. Its ability to optimize traffic dynamically, enhance security, and simplify management across multiple locations has been invaluable. With SD-WAN, we’ve reduced dependency on costly MPLS, improved cloud application performance, and gained greater control over our network infrastructure.

Incentivized

No very intuitive for none trained customer, very complicated to assure a day to day operations if you don't have a strong knowledges on network routing OSPF BGP RIP etc... The different platforms and range of furnitures with specific options is very complicated for the integration and consolidation of the solution.

Incentivized

I think if we could afford, we could have HA inplace but we planned out outage and workaround to avoid any outages.

Incentivized

It does slow down over the period but it's same with other product. you need to clear/reboot services.

Incentivized

Initial setup of any SD-WAN is complicated and difficult because there is so much to do and it is so very granular. Because of this, Cisco has a number of free onboarding help setups. I worked one-on-one with a couple of engineers during our POC, and those relationships continued afterwards into the Pilot. And that's not even counting the Cisco TAC experience or the number of How-To videos and documents they have uploaded on their sites.

I was late to participate but my team was very happy with the outcome.

Incentivized

We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.

Incentivized

Really strength in scalability. Only thigs it's depends on some prototype Cisco product which you can't work with other Cisco products.

Incentivized

• It had a very positive experience, especially for the power plants that have actually already transitioned into Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. I think Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a very powerful tool for them because again, it allows peace of mind for redundancy purposes. Most power plants are located in a very remote area where before they used to have only certain choices for circuits to get out. So this allows to integrate any choice that you have there, not just point to point. So no, it is been great. Again, we're still in the process of transforming the whole network into Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so yeah, no, so far so good.

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.