Skip to main content

Service Providers Prioritize Performance Management for SD-WAN

Sergio Bea
Accedian

As the global telecommunications industry embraces SD-WAN, service providers are finding that corporate customers are increasingly favoring the technology as a managed service for specific applications at smaller sites.


A recent study from Accedian, Amdocs, and VMware, working with Heavy Reading analysts, surveyed 103 global telecom service providers on issues related to SD-WAN managed services implementation, including where they see growth and what the industry considered its biggest challenges in the implementation of SD-WAN.

Promising Opportunities in Certain Verticals

Unsurprisingly, the verticals that have the clearest use cases are seen as the highest priority targets for service providers to build out their offerings. Leading the pack is the retail industry, considered a priority by 45% of respondents. The ability to connect multiple storefronts, warehouses, and delivery hubs, and provide customers with a multichannel experience were seen as shining examples of SD-WAN in action.

Manufacturing came in second, with 38% of respondents saying it was a priority. Manufacturing at a global scale can involve operations from a variety of sites, including production facilities, factory floors, warehouses, and throughout the supply chain in general, making it an appealing target for SD-WAN services.

In third place was the healthcare industry, with 32% of respondents calling it a priority. This finding is no doubt because of the pandemic fueling demand for cloud applications like remote healthcare, which operates from disparate locations like the doctor's office, hospital, and pharmacy.

Navigating Challenges

The survey also asked service providers about the challenges they faced when building out SD-WAN offerings.

The biggest challenge, faced by 66% of the survey's respondents, was monitoring network performance. This seems to be even more daunting at scale, with 71% of service providers whose annual revenue exceeds $5B acknowledging the struggle.

Also top of mind for service providers was the ability to correlate events across physical underlay and overlay, with 61% of those larger service providers reporting an issue.

When it comes to managing network performance, more than 60% of respondents reported using three or more different management tools for SD-WAN service. A smaller, but still significant 16% of respondents reported using five or more tools.

Looking Ahead

As service providers continue to build out SD-WAN, it is likely that many will embrace automation to aid in the management of network performance. When it came specifically to managing performance of the underlying network, 37% of respondents indicated that automation was critical, making it the number one priority.

It is also worth noting that, although automation for provisioning, verification, and activation have become relatively common practice in the last few years, automating those three capabilities is a top priority for companies who have not already done so.

The report finds that many service providers are achieving their SD-WAN performance goals by outsourcing active performance monitoring to third party providers.

The report also suggests that service providers may find they are unable to streamline their SD-WAN services by reducing the number of products they offer, but that they may be able to enlist the help of open standard third party providers to simplify their offerings.

There's an obvious opportunity with SD-WAN. Service providers have been hard at work setting expectations with their customers, promising improved performance, faster deployments, and overall better end user experiences on their networks.

In order to deliver on those promises, there will be no room for service providers to neglect performance monitoring. Customers will hold service providers to the KPIs they deliver. If a provider's performance, relationships, and reputation are on the line, following through on critical priorities like performance management and automation should be the number one priority.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

Service Providers Prioritize Performance Management for SD-WAN

Sergio Bea
Accedian

As the global telecommunications industry embraces SD-WAN, service providers are finding that corporate customers are increasingly favoring the technology as a managed service for specific applications at smaller sites.


A recent study from Accedian, Amdocs, and VMware, working with Heavy Reading analysts, surveyed 103 global telecom service providers on issues related to SD-WAN managed services implementation, including where they see growth and what the industry considered its biggest challenges in the implementation of SD-WAN.

Promising Opportunities in Certain Verticals

Unsurprisingly, the verticals that have the clearest use cases are seen as the highest priority targets for service providers to build out their offerings. Leading the pack is the retail industry, considered a priority by 45% of respondents. The ability to connect multiple storefronts, warehouses, and delivery hubs, and provide customers with a multichannel experience were seen as shining examples of SD-WAN in action.

Manufacturing came in second, with 38% of respondents saying it was a priority. Manufacturing at a global scale can involve operations from a variety of sites, including production facilities, factory floors, warehouses, and throughout the supply chain in general, making it an appealing target for SD-WAN services.

In third place was the healthcare industry, with 32% of respondents calling it a priority. This finding is no doubt because of the pandemic fueling demand for cloud applications like remote healthcare, which operates from disparate locations like the doctor's office, hospital, and pharmacy.

Navigating Challenges

The survey also asked service providers about the challenges they faced when building out SD-WAN offerings.

The biggest challenge, faced by 66% of the survey's respondents, was monitoring network performance. This seems to be even more daunting at scale, with 71% of service providers whose annual revenue exceeds $5B acknowledging the struggle.

Also top of mind for service providers was the ability to correlate events across physical underlay and overlay, with 61% of those larger service providers reporting an issue.

When it comes to managing network performance, more than 60% of respondents reported using three or more different management tools for SD-WAN service. A smaller, but still significant 16% of respondents reported using five or more tools.

Looking Ahead

As service providers continue to build out SD-WAN, it is likely that many will embrace automation to aid in the management of network performance. When it came specifically to managing performance of the underlying network, 37% of respondents indicated that automation was critical, making it the number one priority.

It is also worth noting that, although automation for provisioning, verification, and activation have become relatively common practice in the last few years, automating those three capabilities is a top priority for companies who have not already done so.

The report finds that many service providers are achieving their SD-WAN performance goals by outsourcing active performance monitoring to third party providers.

The report also suggests that service providers may find they are unable to streamline their SD-WAN services by reducing the number of products they offer, but that they may be able to enlist the help of open standard third party providers to simplify their offerings.

There's an obvious opportunity with SD-WAN. Service providers have been hard at work setting expectations with their customers, promising improved performance, faster deployments, and overall better end user experiences on their networks.

In order to deliver on those promises, there will be no room for service providers to neglect performance monitoring. Customers will hold service providers to the KPIs they deliver. If a provider's performance, relationships, and reputation are on the line, following through on critical priorities like performance management and automation should be the number one priority.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...