Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Spotlight: Silver Peak Systems

Q&A with Fraser Street, VP of Technical Alliances at Silver Peak

Fortinet sits down with Fabric-Ready Partner, Silver Peak to learn what’s top of mind for its customers, the key IT challenges they are facing and how Silver Peak’s approach to integrated security is helping drive business and customer success.

Tell us a bit about Silver Peak’s business and the types of customers that you serve.

Silver Peak was founded in 2004 and is a global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions. The company serves more than 2000 geographically distributed enterprises in 80 countries around the world. Silver Peak offers a high-performance SD-WAN solution, Unity EdgeConnect, which provides customers with secure and reliable virtual overlays to connect users to applications, with the flexibility to use any combination of underlying transport without compromising application performance. This results in greater business agility and lower costs for customers. Silver Peak also has partnerships with global service providers to deploy and deliver managed SD-WAN services to customers around the world.

What is the top IT challenge or concern that your customers face today?

Geographically distributed enterprises increasingly view the cloud and wide area network as critical to connecting their users to the applications that drive their businesses forward. As the migration of applications to the cloud accelerates, it’s driving a need for enterprises to reevaluate their wide area networking requirements, including the adoption of economical broadband connectivity. IT organizations are under pressure to balance the complexities of managing their legacy infrastructure while accelerating their migration to the cloud, without compromising their effectiveness. By building an SD-WAN, enterprises can achieve dramatic cost savings, confidently embrace the internet and accelerate cloud initiatives, proactively maintain the security of business operations, and dramatically simplify IT operations.

Silver Peak recently joined Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready Partner Program. Can you share a bit about your history of working with Fortinet and why being an alliance partner in our program is important for your business and customers? 

With an installed base of more than 2000 enterprise customers, many of whom have sophisticated IT operations with stringent security requirements, Silver Peak has years of experience in building high-performance WANs in partnership with Fortinet. Silver Peak EdgeConnect enables enterprises to effectively leverage broadband internet to connect users to applications whether they reside in the data center or the cloud, which makes integration and interoperability with industry leading security products like FortiGate even more critical to the success of our mutual customers.

Are you seeing a shift in IT or cybersecurity buying criteria from your customers for solutions that are, by nature, more open, automated, and able to interoperate with their existing infrastructure?

Yes. Enterprises are proactively reevaluating their WAN requirements to connect users to applications without compromising the performance, reliability, and security of their networks. In parallel, enterprises are extending their security infrastructure to leverage broadband internet connectivity at the branch to provide direct connectivity to SaaS and Cloud-based applications.  For Silver Peak, this requires us to provide our joint customers with solutions that can be easily integrated with Fortinet, including automated service chaining in virtual deployments.

In an industry where continued technology innovation is a business driver imperative, how do coopetition and open collaboration across multi-vendor ecosystems, like Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready Program, give you a leg up to deliver what your customers demand today and into the future? 

The Silver Peak partnership with Fortinet provides a great example of collaboration and coopetition in addressing key customer requirements for performance and security.  We are collaborating closely on the integration of the Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution with Fortinet security and virtualization products, while having some functional overlap across our products. This is great for customers – they get to deploy interoperable solutions that combine best-in-class products, but are also free to select solutions that include baseline functionality at a lower price when that suits the use case.