Brennan IT expands Fortinet partnership with hybrid SD-WAN offering

Managed services provider Brennan IT has launched a hybrid SD-WAN offering targeting customers using hybrid clouds.

The company partnered with Fortinet, combining Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) with broadband internet via SD-WAN with the aim of improving user experience and making more efficient use of the combination of network carriage access.

Brennan IT head of cloud, networking and infrastructure Lyncoln de Mello told CRN that the company uses its core network and centralised service provider platforms to act as the hub for the offering, so customers won’t need to invest in their own core network. The service is akin to using quality-of-service to determine the best path for traffic in and out of an enterprise. Traffic such as Office 365 that could be best-directed over the Internet will take that path. Other applications that can happily use MPLS will do so, and customers won't need to re-jig those apps to traverse the public internet.

De Mello said Brennan's deep Fortinet expertise made the new service possible.

“Not many [Fortinet] partners can combine Fortinet all the way up its whole application stack, not only using the core offering but also FortiManager products and [Fortinet] analytics products to offer a compelling SD-WAN solution,” he said.

The offering, dubbed “Hybrid Secure SD-WAN”, is aimed at customers who have gone hybrid for their IT, such as hosting some workloads in the cloud while maintaining their own IP infrastructure.

“[Traditional] SD-WAN isn’t going to deliver a lot of benefit to these customers, so organisations with multiple sites and has hybrid IT are our primary target,” de Mello added.

“Now the network is also evolving to match the hybrid IT and networks. I think in the future this would be the case for most organisations, and SD-WAN — not just for us, but a lot of the other network providers and telcos — become the default proposition.”

De Mello said Brennan is taking the product to market in an “all-inclusive” fashion, whether a customer buys carriage that terminates in traditional WAN or in an SD-WAN architecture. The company bundles them all together for the same price, carriage inclusive, SD-WAN appliance, all the steering rules, a self-service visibility portal.

“We prefer that the customer buys a carriage together with us with the whole kit and caboodle, and we also allow the customer to BYO, so it’s not an all-or-nothing approach with us,” he said.

Brennan IT buys wholesale carriage from local telcos like Telstra, Optus, TPG, etc, but also has international capabilities as well, with partnerships with SingTel, Hong-Kong’s PCCW and more.