Enterprises have rapidly adopted "as-a-service" models for applications, storage and computing and are now poised to do the same for Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), according to a recent survey conducted by Eleven Research on behalf of Graphiant.
The survey, which collected 200 responses from large enterprises in North American, found that MPLS and SD-WAN are failing to meet the needs of emerging network edge use cases.
"This happens every 10-11 years," says Khalid Raza, founder & CEO of Graphiant. "I saw this in 2000 while pioneering MPLS at Cisco. I saw it when I co-founded Viptela in 2012. And now It’s time again for a new approach to the network edge.”
Respondents called out three critical uses cases:
- Enterprise connectivity has changed in recent years, with a surge in remote workers, remote offices, and IoT.
- Cloud connectivity is the second use case that stretches enterprise capabilities.
- And trends such as digital transformation and the service economy are pushing enterprises to connect more often with customers and partners.
"These new use cases are tough for MPLS and SD-WAN," says Robert Spangler, Senior Network Engineer at Ballad Health. "MPLS is too slow to deploy and change and far too expensive. And SD-WAN can't handle that number of tunnels."
In March, Graphiant, a start-up based in San Jose, California, announced a $62 million Series B funding round for its network edge service that promises to shake up the established framework of VPNs, including MPLS and SDWAN.
Graphiant provides a next-gen network edge that combines the performance and security of MPLS with the agility of “as-a-Service” delivery. The company says it can deliver SLA-class performance at up to 70% less cost.
