Silver Peak Slows Down After Being Acquired by HPE: The End of Innovation?
There has been a great deal of inconsistency with many SD-WAN vendors: Cisco acquiring Viptela, VMware acquiring VeloCloud and Oracle acquiring Talari Networks. More recently, HPE announced their intent to acquire Silver Peak on July 13th 2020.
Before they were acquired by HPE, Silver Peak, founded in 2004, developed products for wide area networks (WANs), including WAN optimization and SD-WAN solutions. As a leader in both the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN optimization and WAN edge infrastructure, it was puzzling that such an outstanding company would be willing to be acquired by another. Why would this successful company sell out at their peak of their success?
Over the past 16 years, Silver Peak focused on developing wide area network products, providing WAN optimization and SD-WAN solutions. As time passed and IT technology evolved, customer requirements changed, leaving Silver Peak facing challenges to provide a solution that fulfilled all customer needs, and hurting their ability to compete in a saturated market. Silver Peak found they needed to cooperate with other vendors to be competitive, prompting partnerships with companies like Zscaler and Check Point to boost their product security capabilities, and VMware to enhance their virtualization capabilities. Regardless of the new partnerships, Silver Peak found themselves dealing with new issues caused by multi-vendor partnerships including ballooning costs, poor support and difficult to manage components. Eventually Silver Peak was probably unable to keep pace with the market and was put up for acquisition.
The End of Innovation?
However, being acquired by HPE does not necessarily mean it is good. Several vendors that were acquired by HPE have seen their growth slow down in terms of innovation. For example, ArcSight, was one of the leaders of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). After the acquisition by HPE in 2010, its leading position in the Gartner MQ has slowly dropped through the years. After another merger in 2016 with Microfocus (where HPE retains a majority of the ownership), its position further shrunk from leader to niche player.
Customers could expect to be stuck with a great product that will cease to innovate and should not expect much added value in the future. For channel partners, betting on the wrong vendor could make you lose your competitive edge in the next couple of years against younger and more aggressive players.
Sangfor SD-WAN has steadily gained a reputation for excellent service and functionality, while other industry vendors have consistently proven themselves unequal to the task of providing consistent and revolutionary functions to customers.
Sangfor Technologies is a leading global vendor of IT infrastructure solutions, specializing in Cloud Computing & Network Security with a wide range of products including Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Next-Generation Firewall (NGAF), Internet Access Management (IAM), WAN Optimization, SD-WAN, and a wholly owned Wi-Fi solution subsidiary through Sundray Technology, providing organizations with a one-stop solution for their IT needs.
Benefits of Sangfor SD-WAN
- One-stop Solution
- Sangfor provides one-stop wide-area network solutions for a wide range of customers of all sizes.
- Accelerated SD-WAN 2 in 1 Features (WANO)
- Customer networks evolve from the MPLS age to Hybrid WAN and accelerate digital transformation with the added benefit of simple deployment.
- One device as gateway, reduces branch device costs. Suggested for small branches.
- Supports hardware bypass and deploys without any network changes. Suggested for large branches and small data centers.
- Zero down time during deployment and better performance. Suggested for large data centers
- Centralized Platform
- One centralized platform manages all network components including WAN optimization, Firewall and SD-WAN, with simple full-network control which frees up IT resources.
