Macquarie Telecom Doubles Down On SD-WAN As It Reaches 6,000 Sites

Macquarie Telecom, part of Macquarie Telecom Group (ASX: MAQ), today announced it has deployed its SD-WAN services to 6,000 sites across Australia after pioneering the technology in Australia less than four years ago.

The company will invest and hire additional staff in Australia across areas including engineering, customer service and marketing, aiming to double the number of sites in half the time. Macquarie Group Executive Luke Clifton believes the company’s early recognition of the significance of the technology and willingness to go all in has been crucial to its success.

“Our competitors in this space don’t actually want customers using SD-WAN because, frankly, their margins are higher with older MPLS technology,” said Clifton.

“We never subscribed to that, and what we saw coming has now been proven. Cloud computing has asserted its dominance over enterprise applications – why would networks be any different? We’ve calculated our team has poured 7,900 hours into researching, engineering and iterating our solution and the results speak for themselves.”

SD-WAN – software-defined wide area networking – decouples network management from its underlying physical infrastructure. This allows enterprises to securely connect users to applications, enables better visibility and control over apps’ impact on bandwidth and can provide automatic and instant switching between, for example, an nbn line and a 4G backup to ensure users don’t experience downtime.

Macquarie flew past the 6,000-site milestone with a number of key SD-WAN deals signed with businesses including pharmaceutical financial services specialist Guild Group, not-for-profit supporting people with a disability Civic Disability Services, and business and industrial imaging company Konica Minolta.

The next 6,000

With Australia’s SD-WAN market tipped to expand by nearly 30 per cent annually to 2024, as ‘SD-WAN technology becomes the primary means of connectivity within an enterprise’, Macquarie believes security will be a defining factor in its continued expansion.

“The increase of BYOD and work-from-home or anywhere have expanded the attack surface when security is already top of mind for mid-sized Australian companies, CIOs, and IT managers,” added Clifton.

“Our architecture is flexible and can match with any security provider’s environment. Combined with our sovereign, secure cloud services, the fact that we’re among a select number of certified providers for the highest level of government data, and our NPS-proven customer service, which remains unmatched in the market, we’re in a great position to take SD-WAN to the next level.”

The company sees particular opportunities to expand its footprint in the retail and aged care sectors, with the two industries rapidly digitising in the wake of a seismic shift to online shopping, and the Aged Care Royal Commission shedding light on the greater role technology can play.

“Congratulations to the Macquarie Telecom team on reaching this milestone,” said Brad Anderson, Vice President and Managing Director for VMware in A/NZ. “As customers move to the cloud and modernise their applications, they need technologies to simplify their IT. SD-WAN takes the complexity out of managing the network while enabling all employees to have fast, easy access to the tools they need, from anywhere. We look forward to working with Macquarie Telecom as the team heads towards the next 6,000.”

Macquarie’s SD-WAN is powered by VMware-owned VeloCloud technology, with the Australian telco recognised with the APJ Partner Innovation Award for SD-WAN at the VMware Partner Awards. The 6,000-site milestone follows the recent launch of Macquarie’s complementary SD-LAN services, which apply a similar decoupling of software and hardware in Wi-Fi networks.

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