MacTel to ramp up VeloCloud SD-WAN offering with new staff, investments

Macquarie Telecom is ramping up its SD-WAN offering with new staff and other investments as it looks to double its growth.

The company revealed this week that it has deployed some 6000 SD-WAN services since launching the offering close to four years ago, and now plans to reach 12,000 sites in half the time.

MacTel said it will look to achieve that goal by hiring additional staff across areas including engineering, customer service and marketing. To reach that 12,000 number, the company said it would target the retail and aged care sectors.

Some of the customers included in that 6000 figure include financial services specialist Guild Group, not-for-profit supporting people with a disability Civic Disability Services, and business and industrial imaging company Konica Minolta.

MacTel is a reseller of VMware VeloCloud, a vendor of cloud-delivered SD-WAN, since August 2017, claiming to be the first Aussie telco to “deliver a true SD-WAN solution” at the time.

Macquarie Telecom group executive Luke Clifton said the company getting early to the technology and its “willingness to go all-in” contributed to the offering’s growth.

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

“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.”

MacTel cited an IDC report that said the SD-WAN market is expected to expand by some 30 percent annually to 2024, saying that the tech would become the primary means of connectivity within an enterprise.

“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,” Clifton said.

“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.”

VMware ANZ managing director Brad Anderson said, “Congratulations to the Macquarie Telecom team on reaching this milestone. 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 6000.”