We’re actively expanding our partner community in India: Feroz Zaveri, Aryaka Networks

By Nandita Singh

Silicon Valley, California headquartered Aryaka Networks that has a 200 people strong presence in India functioning out of Bengaluru is looking at stepping up customer acquisition in the India market. Aryaka Networks’ APAC Business Head, Feroz Zaveri, in a chat with Voice&Data Zaveri elaborates on Aryaka focus and strategy roadmap that will assist large enterprises to leverage the shift to digital economy in India.

Voice&Data: What is Aryaka’s India presence currently?

Feroz Zaveri: Founded in 2009 Aryaka Networks is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. From the outset, the company has had a strong presence in India with parts of the sales, marketing, R&D, and customer support teams functioning out of Bengaluru. In fact, some of our earliest Points of Presence (PoPs) were located in Indian metros. Aryaka’s presence in India has been a critical part of the company’s operations and growth. Our CEO, Shawn Farshchi, calls this Aryaka’s “India Velocity”. The India office, which houses around 200 employees, is not merely a cost center as it is for many companies in the world. It’s a strategic driver of our company’s growth. Over the years, the company has experienced hyper-growth, consistently exceeding 100% year-over-year growth in revenue, and with 500+ global enterprise customers to date.

Voice&Data: What constitutes Aryaka’s offering to the market?

Feroz Zaveri: Aryaka’s founders were networking industry veterans, with decades of leadership experience in various networking technology companies. In the backdrop of an exploding cloud services market, and increasing globalization, the company was built to address the evolving connectivity needs of businesses worldwide. Application performance suffers when network traffic crosses oceans. It isn’t enough for enterprises to simply migrate their applications to the cloud. Optimized access to critical cloud/SaaS applications is equally important.

The Internet is heavily congested, and therefore, not a reliable connectivity medium. Poor application performance over the Internet hurts productivity, collaboration and business execution.

Traditional alternatives like MPLS offer limited cloud connectivity, and are inherently incapable of supporting optimization for cloud-and SaaS-based applications. Further, MPLS is expensive and takes too long to deploy.

At Aryaka, we designed the world’s only global SD-WAN (software-defined WAN). Aryaka’s solution is built over a global “Smart Connect” network with built-in WAN optimization that enables our customers to experience enterprise-grade connectivity and application acceleration, anywhere in the world.

In a way, Aryaka achieves the “democratization” of the wide area network. After all, why should there be any difference in application performance between what an employee experiences in India and what one experiences in Silicon Valley?

Voice&Data: Please elaborate on your India market strategy?

Feroz Zaveri: Aryaka’s strategy with respect to the India market is not too different from our global strategy. We target businesses of all sizes and segments, businesses that have globally distributed branch offices, and are migrating their applications to the cloud.

India is relationship-oriented market. It is important to build a strong local presence in the region, and interact with business and IT owners in person. Therefore, we’ve moved from a direct inside-sales approach to a partner-centric sales model. This model has yielded very encouraging results globally, with a significant percent of our bookings in 2016 contributed by partners. We’re actively expanding our partner community in India, and we have a few exciting partnerships lined up.

We’re also focused on enhancing our cloud/SaaS acceleration capabilities to address the growing demand. To this end, we’ve partnered with Microsoft to provide direct connectivity to the Azure cloud, and have built a Direct Connect relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide private connectivity to the AWS cloud.

These initiatives have yielded phenomenal results, Aurobindo Pharma, Lupin, are some of our top customers headquartered in India. A recent customer win from India includes Bajaj Electricals, a leading consumer electrical equipment manufacturing company, has chosen Aryaka to deliver improved network connectivity between its headquarters in Mumbai, India, and branch offices in China and Dubai. .

Voice&Data: How important is India market to Aryaka in the overall scheme of things?

Feroz Zaveri: India is no longer an emerging market. It is a global economic powerhouse – a key global player across all industry segments. Indian businesses are now acquiring companies on foreign soil.

Indian CIOs are now going after cutting-edge technology in a big way, and are increasingly migrating their applications to the cloud. AWS has more than 75,000 customers in India! Gartner reports indicate that the public cloud services market in India is expected to touch more than $2 billion by 2018.

For a company that provides global connectivity and accelerates the performance of cloud/SaaS based applications, this presents a huge target market to address.

Apart from the growing adoption of the cloud for compute and storage, we’re seeing a similar trend for cloud-based network services as well. India has evolved from being merely a consumer to a driver of cloud-based technologies such as Aryaka’s.

Voice&Data: What is Aryaka’s unique proposition in the network deployments?

Feroz Zaveri: With growing SaaS and IaaS deployments, numerous network services have mushroomed, claiming to support the large-scale migration of global enterprises to the cloud.

MPLS providers, ISPs, WAN Optimization vendors, regional SD-WAN vendors, and others bring a set of contrasting technological approaches to the table. However, each of these technologies falls short of addressing the application performance problem.

MPLS providers provide only limited connectivity to cloud services, and need up to several months to deploy. Appliance-based WAN Optimization technologies are capital-intensive and require ongoing maintenance and management. Regional SD-WAN vendors only provide intelligent traffic routing capabilities at the edge, on top of pre-existing legacy network links.

Aryaka is the only company to combine enterprise-grade connectivity, WAN Optimization, application acceleration, and SD-WAN functionality on to a single platform, and move it to the cloud.

Our global SD-WAN has been designed from the outset to reduce complexity and cost, provide reliable global network connectivity, and most importantly, to deliver enhanced application performance for cloud services in all geographies. Moreover, the fully integrated solution can be deployed in only a matter of days.

Voice&Data: In view of the competitive SD-WAN services market today, how is Aryaka positioned?

Feroz Zaveri: With the onset of the cloud-era, legacy WAN providers have had to transform and adapt themselves to the changing technology landscape, while some vendors have brought a variety of new approaches to the table. This has caused the WAN market to become quite cluttered with MPLS providers, ISPs, WAN Optimization vendors, and SD-WAN providers.

However, since the advent of MPLS, there has not been a more exciting period in the global WAN space as the trend of growing SD-WAN services in the market today. Most of these services, however, by themselves, do not address all connectivity and application acceleration needs of today’s global businesses.

WAN Optimization vendors and regional SD-WAN players have started partnering to offer more comprehensive edge-device functionalities. Some of these providers have also partnered with large MPLS providers to address connectivity. However, these solutions have not gained much traction in the market, due to high costs, complexity, integration hassles, and the rigidity of MPLS links.

Aryaka is perfectly positioned in this landscape to deliver on-demand network connectivity and serve application acceleration needs of today’s global, cloud-enabled businesses.