Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs. SD-WAN Concierge

It is a flexible tool for managing and optimizing WAN connections, but it does require some technical expertise to manage. It excels in its ability to integrate multiple WANs. It will however be a not-so-useful purchase if your company has few locations as it will be more expensive and complex for nothing.

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

• Enhancing network security by integrating with other security solutions and providing secure segmentation of the network.
• Improving network visibility and control by providing detailed analytics and network-wide policy management.
• Simplifying branch office networking by reducing the need for specialized hardware and simplifying network management.

Incentivized

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

• It does appear to be a little glitchy when you go from template mode to CLI mode and try to do testing on certain areas. The configuration tends to get hung in that old session when you drop it from being controlled by the controller to making changes in CLI. I've had a lot of instances where you try to put it back into controller mode for review management and it holds on to your items you've had in CLI mode , it gets a little confused at which config it needs to use. You end up having to reset the whole number environment.

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.

highly recommended

Incentivized

It is the best solution on the market.

Incentivized

Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.

Incentivized

The proof-of-concept setup that was done at a client site did provided a greater positive impression by Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN than Fortinet Secure SD-WAN for sure. It makes sense to use Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN while the major client is a Cisco house where more than 95% of network equipment used at their global networks are Cisco's.

Incentivized

• It's definitely decreased the amount that we spend on really expensive circuits every year. We're moving to cheaper broadband circuits with much higher throughput, being able to leverage those and still get the performance that we want, the quality of service that we want.

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.