AppEx won 2017 SD-WAN Solution Excellence Award

On Dec. 28, 2017, ZDNet China held its annual ZD Awards Ceremony. As expected, AppEx Networks won 2017 SD-WAN Solution Excellence Award with its flagship CloudWAN enterprise WAN platform.

About ZD Award

Organized by ZDNet China, ZD Award is a prestigious honor for global vendors that play in China enterprise IT market. The vendors and their solutions are assessed by industry top experts according to product/technology researches and customer surveys. It aims to provide guidance to IT & business decision makers for product and technology selections.

Why AppEx CloudWAN?

AppEx CloudWAN is an Enterprise-Grade network powered by SDN and WAN optimization. With its unique ZetaTCP technology, AppEx can significantly optimize data transmission over normal Internet links. In many scenarios, ZetaTCP optimized internet links can reach the quality of leased lines and MPLS. With this unique strength, AppEx CloudWAN enables an Enterprise-Grade connectivity based on hybrid networks, and hence gains the best price-performance for its enterprise customers.

Besides, AppEx CloudWAN also gains its reputation in terms of fast deployments, global coverages, and integrated fast access to public Clouds and SaaS applications. Now CloudWAN has become the most widely used SD-WAN service in China, covering a wide range of market sectors including retail, manufacturing, construction, finance, education, and high-tech industry, with many global Fortune 500 companies in its customer portfolio.

We deeply believe that AppEx CloudWAN represents the best SD-WAN solution so far for those enterprises who wants to migrate to a more flexible and cost-effective WAN solution, or needs cross-border data connectivity.

2018 Predictions for SD-WAN

In 2017, SD-WAN has become one of the hottest trend in enterprise WAN. An prediction from IDC indicates that SD-WAN market size will reach billion in the next two years. According to Gartner's report, only 1% of enterprises deployed SD-WAN in 2016, and this number will reach 30% by 2020. There is no doubt that SD-WAN adoption will further accelerate in 2018.

The trend of Cloud, SaaS, and OBOR (One Belt One Road) will accelerate SD-WAN adoption in China

Cloud & SaaS: With the rapid development of Cloud services, SD-WAN solution will be the best choice for enterprises to access resource from public Cloud & SaaS applications.

OBOR: China’s OBOR initiative is often in those regions lacking sufficient network and IT infrastructures, like Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. SD-WAN’s flexibility in terms of local network infrastructures and deployment time make it a compelling WAN solution for large enterprises that need to expand operations into those regions.

Hybrid SD-WAN solution will be the trend

Existing SD-WAN solutions can be categorized by Appliance model and Service model.

Appliance model SD-WAN replaces existing router and VPN devices at customer edges with SD-WAN CPE devices that centrally managed CPE Orchestrator.

Service model SD-WAN provides enterprise WAN services for customers with lower price, better price-performance and more rapid deployment comparing to traditional leased line and MPLS solutions. Service model SD-WAN directly replaces leased line and MPLS.

We believe that the diversity of enterprise customer requirements and usage scenarios will lead to the elimination of the boundary between Appliance and Service SD-WAN models. Hybrid SD-WAN solution with both customer edge appliance and connectivity service offerings will be the trend going forward.

SD-WAN will be a huge opportunity for service providers

With the inevitable dominance of SD-WAN solution in future enterprise WAN market, network and MPLS service providers will likely collaborate with SD-WAN vendors with advanced technologies and provide their existing customers with SD-WAN solutions, leveraging their own network resources as the backbone of the SD-WAN network. Large enterprises, especially those with cross region branches, will benefit from the combined strengths of service providers and leading SD-WAN vendors.

In 2018, we believe AppEx Networks will continue to leverage their WAN and SDN technology advantages and further advance their SD-WAN market leading position in China, and grab more market share among global SD-WAN players.