HITT – Network Bundling Strategies for SMB Sales Success

So I’m excited to welcome Graeme Scott, VP of advanced networking mobility, as well as Jason Kaufman, our principal solution architect. Graeme, Jason, thank you so much for joining us again. Love to have you here. So I’m gonna go ahead and let you take it away.

Awesome. Yeah. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. So, Chandler, you can go ahead and kick it over to the next slide.

Always great to have, probably the smartest guy in the company with us, Jason Kaufman. Kaufman, good morning. How are you, my friend?

Good morning. I was about to ask who are we waiting on.

Yeah. Well, guys, one of the things we learn about industry is that everybody copies the winners. Right? And one of the most successful strategies that have happened over the last couple couple of years is the quick serve restaurant bundling.

What they did is they went in there and they put together bundles and really did a huge, created a lot of benefit for the industry. So we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. We’re gonna talk a little bit about the psychology behind it and how we can use those same concepts when we’re having network conversation. So first off, you know, this is not a conversation just about upselling.

It’s a conversation about architecture. Okay? It’s about Okay? It’s about whether we’re unintentionally leaving environments incomplete because we hesitate to expand the conversation.

So most of you we know, about eighty four percent, enter accounts via connectivity. That is the mud one of the most common items that our advisers sell, like I said, about eighty percent of you, and you’re coming into the account that way. So how do we expand that conversation? How do we create value for our customers while also creating income and revenue for us?

So let’s go ahead and move to the next slide.

What’s in it for me? Right? I think we always wanna start about this. So let’s be honest.

Let’s think what we’re thinking here. You know, you’re busy. Margins are thin. Deals stall. Customers push back.

And sometimes, the cleanest deal is just, hey. Let’s just drop in a single line of Internet and move on. So how can we expand beyond that conversation? And if we do so, what’s in it for us?

Well, I think, obviously, higher average contract value. Right? That’s a big one. But when then we start to think about things like stickier accounts.

Right? The more products we have in each of those accounts, the sticker the stickier they are. We get caught in less commoditized pricing conversations, and we reduce churn. So this isn’t just about adding SKUs and adding revenue to our pocket, although that’s certainly part of it.

It’s about shifting from being a simple vendor or a someone that they just go to and buy a single product to being an adviser. Okay. So let’s go ahead and move to the next slide.

So let’s take a look about what happened, in the quick serve restaurant business. Right? We can learn from the success they had in that space. So quick serve restaurants didn’t create combos just because they loved fries.

Right? I love fries. Everybody loves fries. But that’s not why they created it. They did it because margins were thin, competition was brutal, and customer behavior was unpredictable.

Now if that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We’re dealing with a lot of those same things in the network space. Right? We hear a lot about network being commoditized.

We hear a lot about thin margins, and I think those of us who’ve been around for a while can see this. Right? The money you made selling a cable circuit five years ago is not the money you make today mostly because of price compression. Right?

So what happened? Well, quick serve restaurants, and when they were dealing with this challenge, they made the combo default. Meaning, it was expected that we would start with the combo. Right?

Average ticket size increased, ordering became faster, and revenue became more predictable. Bundling wasn’t just marketing fluff. It was margin margin stabilization. And now at this point, it seems like I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’ll go through a fast food place and order just the sandwich, and it’s, like, weird when I say, hey.

I don’t want fries. I don’t want some of these things. People kinda give me a sideways look. So the combo, the bundle became the default purchase option for customers as they went through the quick serve restaurant chain.

So what happened there? Chandler, you can go ahead to the next slide. The other thing that happened is we also started doing digital upsell. If you notice now, you go to a lot of these quick serve restaurants.

Everything is done digitally. You can order online. You can order through a terminal. And when digital ordering and kiosk were introduced, data showed that the average order value increased about eight percent in quick serve restaurant and about fifteen percent in rough casual.

So why is that? Not because we were manipulating customers, but because the decision environment, the environment where customers were making their decisions changed. And this is from a report that was released by Technonomic via Investopedia in two thousand twenty four. Eight percent increase in quick serve restaurant and fifteen percent increase in fast casual.

So let’s go ahead and move to the next slide. Why does this work? Right? Well, bundling works because of human behavior.

Right? This thing called the default effect that I talked about a little bit earlier where customers will come in and the combo is the default. You feel kind of weird if you order outside of that structure. Customers were, you know, have decision fatigue.

Too many options creates fatigue, and the bundle reduces that. Right? The other thing is price framing. Bundles make individual items feel incomplete, and customers are naturally gonna compare the bundle value against piecemeal pricing.

Right? When you buy just the sandwich, you’re like, well, for only a buck more, I can get fries and a drink? Let me get all of that. And then, of course, risk reduction.

When we bundle, when we add things, it feels safer. Right? It feels like more of a complete solution, and we’re not missing anything. So let’s go ahead and bridge that to our buyer, our tech buyer, the bridge to tech.

So SMB buyers are very much the same. Right? They are trying to avoid risk. They want to, reduce the amount of decisions they’re making, and they want to make sure that they’ve got a complete solution for their business.

They’re not sitting around designing architecture. They’re running payroll. They’re shipping products. They’re fixing HVACs. They are serving their customers.

They don’t wanna have to worry about all that stuff. That’s why they look to the adviser. That’s why they look to our community to help them with those decisions.

So let’s look at what this looks like when we’re talking about it from, putting some numbers behind it. So, Chandler, you can go to the next slide.

SMB buying behavior. There’s a a research group called SMB Group, which did a lot of research on SMBs. Go figure. And they found that SMB buyers prioritize the following.

Cost effectiveness at a rate of forty three percent, compatibility and integration at a rate of thirty four percent, ease of use at thirty three percent, and over half say vendors need to explain business impact better. So they are literally telling us that they value integration and sim simplicity. So how do our we design bundles that align with that. Right?

We just saw their priorities, cost, integration, easiness. Right? Those are the things that they told us they prioritized, and network is the entry point to all of those things.

So let’s take a look at a couple of these bundles. And for this, I’m gonna bring in my man, Kaufman. Right? So let’s go to the next slide.

Bundle number one, this one’s probably the easiest, resiliency. Okay?

For a twenty percent accounting firm, let’s use that as an example, four hours offline, twenty employees at about forty bucks an hour, and that’s probably being, conservative times four hours, that’s thirty two hundred dollars in exposure for just a four hour at outage. And, again, that is very conservative. So if we look at, resiliency or a backup bundle, that’s not, you know, that’s not basically up selling anymore. It’s operational insurance. So Kaufman, when you have a single circuit SMB and they have something go down, in your experience as an engineer, what does that call typically look like?

Definitely not a happy call. Generally, it’s a lot of, hey. I’m I’m frantic because I if you’re in a quick serve restaurant, as an example, or somebody where he’s customer facing, you have an unhappy customer that needs assistance right then and there. They’re not gonna be understanding, oh, your Internet’s down. I’ll come back when it’s more convenient for you. No. They need their issue resolved, or they need something done right then and there, but you’re also also frantically trying to troubleshoot to get everything back online.

A lot of times, we we hear the stories for leads that come into a lot of the partners that we work with because they had a customer that was in a retail environment like a like a mall structure, and they sold them the primary. They sold them an SD WAN, a know, cost effective SD WAN, and just a cheap cellular backup. And when all the Internet went down because of a fiber cut that happened outside, three of their neighbors went down, and they still had Internet working on that cellular so they could still have some business impactful type sales and all the stuff that they were looking to do. So

they’re like, hey. What did you do, and how did you do this? And it was only twenty or thirty dollars more to to have that resiliency. It was a no brainer for these other companies to hop on board as well.

So they’re also comparing to their neighbors and other their competitors on how they stay online through some type of outage.

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. And I think, you know, when I talk when we talk about resiliency backup, I don’t think we’re telling anybody on this call anything they don’t know. Right? This one’s kind of an easy one.

It makes sense to us. The key here is reframing that conversation around the loss. Right? The business loss.

I gave kind of an example of just some quick math there. Thirty two hundred dollars for that one four hour four hour outage versus, what, eighty bucks, ninety bucks, maybe a hundred bucks for a backup circuit. Totally makes sense. But what we’re gonna do here is we’re gonna move into a couple more options where maybe these bundles get a little more complicated and a little tougher to justify for customers.

So we’re gonna give you some tools to do that. So let’s move to our next one there, Chandler. Voice. Right?

I think a lot of people package voice with their bundle. Voice is similar, but we don’t wanna position it as just dial tone. It’s price competition.

If it’s positioned as a workflow coordination, workflow enablement, that really changes the conversation. So, Kaufman, when voice and connectivity are split across different vendors, when we look at different solutions, when we overcomplicate this package, what typically happens when there’s an issue within a customer a customer enterprise?

So real life scenario, previous company I worked at, I worked in support, And I first thing they gave me was a sixty page binder on all the different workflows on how to handle different situations. And ninety per fun fact, ninety percent of them were to kick them out of support and close the ticket because meantime to resolve, the closer you get that down, doesn’t matter if the issue is resolved, it matters when the ticket’s closed. So as a as a voice company, your idea is to blame the network team. The network team is to blame the connectivity team, and then connectivity team is gonna blame the voice team.

So you have that everlasting, you know, revolving circle on who’s gonna blame who, and that finger pointing game is very consistent with a lot of the customer environments that we get pulled into. Hey. You know, we get pulled into UCaaS conversation because somebody is blaming the UCaaS vendor for having an issue. But being agnostic, we hop into that and determine, hey.

You know, what is your what is your SD WAN look like? What is it telling you from, you know, your UI? Does it give you packet loss? Does it give you latency?

Is it telling you the experience of that application for those users? So deep diving into a lot of things that impact what that UCaaS vendor does, because most of them have infrastructure where they’re pretty much a hundred percent uptime for the most part. So why are you as a one customer having an issue? It’s definitely something else for the most part.

So how do we determine what the root cause is of all that stuff rather than just finger pointing on who’s who could possibly be at fault?

Yeah. And I think, you know, we hear that a lot. Right? This increased friction, the resolution slows, the you know, complexity equals cost.

Right? And the more people we’ve gotta deal with, the more things that we’ve got going on, that creates a lot more cost here. So let’s, let’s go ahead and move on to our next slide and talk about something that really helps in that regard, SD WAN. Okay?

So let’s talk a little bit about a retail environment. We talk about SD WAN typically in this, context of multi location deals, but, of course, that’s not always necessarily the case. There’s a lot in there, but I will use an example. Retail location, five locations, Friday night, POS slows down.

Their point of sale system slows down. Things are going you know, they’re taking longer to transact with their customers. Of course, who are they gonna blame? They’re gonna blame the ISP.

But what if it’s not the ISP? What if it’s the way they’re prioritizing traffic? Right? SD WAN isn’t necessarily a feature.

It’s transactional protection in that instance. So, Kaufman, you know, from your experience, when a customer says something like, the Internet is slow, what’s usually happening behind the scenes there?

Most of the time, it’s overcapacity. So in the retail environment, a lot of times when you have that retail worker that just wants to get the credit card machine to work or they wanna see if they have inventory, and you’re just asking them a question as a customer, and they’re just banging on the computer, you know, thinking that’s gonna be the first troubleshooting step. There’s actually a couple people probably in the back that are on the guest Wi Fi watching YouTube videos or Netflix or something like that waiting on somebody to go get out of the changing room or something. There’s a lot of variables that happen there to where most of the time, slow Internet means capacity, whether if you’re on a shared circuit that’s between multiple, companies in your area or you’re just sharing the network environment with people that aren’t using it to to protect, you know, the corporate business impactful traffic.

So that’s where SD WAN comes in. How do you prioritize it to make sure, hey. Just because somebody’s on YouTube in the back, it’s not gonna impact the stuff that we need to work, you know, and make sure business continues.

So a lot of the times at SD WAN, first thing we wanna look at is, hey. You know, what speeds are you subscribed to? How much you know, what does the capacity look like? And then also then look at the resiliency of it on what do you have to back that up in case all else fails.

Yeah. And I think it’s a it’s a great example, right, where adding that service, bundling SD WAN with these other surface services, whether it be voice, whether it be your POS system. Again, it is protecting those business critical applications that you are using within the environment. And all of a sudden, when you start to reframe the conversation around stable at SaaS experience, those kinds of things, it it makes sense to build that out.

It all of a sudden, you’re not just upselling them. You’re not just adding additional cost per month. You’re protecting the business. You’re making sure the business can function in the way that it needs to.

And, Kaufman, just last word on this before we move past SD WAN. I mean, I know that this is something that we’ve kind of been talking through forever. It’s it still amazes me how many advisers sell circuits connectivity without some kind of SD WAN component. And, really, you know, doing so elevates it out of that commodity conversation.

Right?

Oh, definitely. It gives you a much more business driving, you know, factors because you have the ability to, you know, use multiple connect multiple connections come in where it automatically fails over, fails back. If everything’s good, it could use both at the same time to a certain capacity. It’s easily to templatize.

So from a management perspective, you’re saving a lot of headache and fatigue on taking the same configuration from one location to the next, you know, using a single portal to manage everything. SD WAN gives you alerts. So if Internet goes down, you could trigger alerts from the SD WAN vendor to tell you, hey. You’re having packet loss.

This circuit’s down. So you could proactively troubleshoot. It gives you a ton of different value props rather than just, hey. We’re gonna put an Internet circuit in there.

If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we call and get a ticket in. Because everybody knows the experience on call calling a carrier to to have that ticket. There’s plenty of s and l cert plenty of plenty of s and l scripts too that go over how much of a pain that is to deal with somebody pro reactively there.

So, again, SD WAN is a big conversation driver. It’s starting to become the questions that are being asked from the customer on, hey. I need SD WAN, and it’s exactly why. It it helps out from an indirect cost from, you know, IT staff to manage or an owner to manage, but then also the resiliency and the prioritization of traffic.

Many value props to go in there to make it easy on them.

Yeah. With more and more of these applications that are critical to businesses being cloud based applications, understanding your traffic, managing your traffic, whether you’re a single site, multisite, more and more important. So let’s pivot to our next bundle here just to kind of wrap things up. Bundle layer four, one that you are one of your favorites, Kaufman, obviously, something you love to talk about a lot, security.

Right? So I’ll give another kind of quick scenario. Health care office, eighteen employees, basic firewall. I saw some questions in the chat about firewalls.

Single circuit. Right? Everything looks great. We got a firewall. We’re protected. We feel good until something happens.

Right? Attaching security to your connectivity reduces what I’ll call the blast radius and increases your recovery time. So, Kaufman, from an SMB perspective, what’s the most common gap you see in what we call a flat, SMB network, which is what I described with the firewall on the circuit?

Yep. It’s there’s a difference between a regular firewall and then what’s called a next gen firewall with, you know, features like Deepak and inspection, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention. So there’s a lot of things now that enterprise type firewalls back in the day, now they’re pretty much standard process against, you know, the SASE or the next gen firewall vendors. If you’re looking at, like, the Palos, the Cisco, the Fortinet, the Versa, you know, pretty much anybody in that space now has these next gen features.

So make sure that somebody’s up to up to speed on the tech. But then also building into the network, just like Graeme was saying, a flat network is not secure. If I can go on to a printer and ping it from a computer, you know, now that printer can be that isolated factor to where somebody could, you know, overtake that printer because you can’t put an endpoint detection tool on it. Know, something getting above and beyond more than network security, getting more into, you know, full defense and depth cybersecurity, you know, that printer can only be certain amount of protected.

So if somebody, you know, breaches that that printer and takes over it and then able to escalate and access other things that have actually company data on it, there’s many things that go into designing a network to be fully secure. And even fully secure, still, you’re still only mitigating potential threats. You’re not fully protecting something, so you still wanna plan for when an event occurs. So cybersecurity, I don’t wanna go on down that soapbox, Graeme, but, yeah, I mean, building in all these different methodologies to ensure a customer is fully protected depending on the severity and impact of the data, if it does get leaked or does get hacked, you know, there’s a lot that can go into that, and just getting connectivity to basic firewall is not enough.

It is a common misnomer that people say, I have a firewall. I’m protected. Like, okay. Here’s my number.

You know, we have a incident response team ready to go whenever you’re ready for that.

Yeah. Love it. So, okay. So let’s go ahead and move on to our next slide here.

We just talked through four, what I’ll call, typical bundles within the SMB environment. Right? Backup resiliency, voice, SD WAN, and then what I’ll say called basic security. So let’s go back to what we talked about with SMBs and what they prioritize.

Right? They prioritize cost effective, cost predictability. Right?

Integration, ease of use. So when we bundle, when we provide our SMB customers and even mid market customers with these solutions as a package, it doesn’t contradict these priorities. It supports these priorities. This is what our customers want. Fifty six percent of SMBs want vendors to better explain how solutions improve their business goals, not just technical features. So that idea of bundling, giving an entire package is what our customers are asking for. So let’s go ahead and move to the next slide.

This is another thing that our customers really struggle with, and this is the reality in SMB. And when we piecemeal all these solutions together, right, we get what’s called vendor sprawl. And vendor sprawl doesn’t mean paying a bunch of different bills, which, of course, it can. Vendor sprawls means complexity.

It means friction. And, Kaufman, to bring you back in here, you talked about this a little bit. Right? The ISP blames the firewall.

The UCaaS provider blames the network. And IT teams or your IT guy is stuck in the middle playing traffic cop. Right? Every additional vendor increases coordination cost and causes challenges.

So when multiple vendors are provided, how much longer does it typically take to solve the problems?

Well, if you consolidate three vendors down into one for an aggregator that has a voice solution, you could generally cut your troubleshooting time in at least a third. Because take that instance to where we had a UCaaS vendor that that has you know, the customer’s having call quality issues. They call the UCaaS vendor. The UCaaS vendor says, hey.

It’s the network. Okay. We need to pick up the phone now and call the network vendor. And then network vendor says, nope.

It’s the ISP coming in. Everything looks good on our end. So now you have to pick up pick up the phone and call into the ISP. Now you have all these different waiting queues you have to sit in.

Rather than calling that one vendor that has holistic approach and could see everything, they could see it from the UCaaS side. Nope. Everything looks good on our side. We’re seeing PackalOS on the line.

Let’s hop into your network appliance. Okay. Now we’re looking at your network appliance. We could see the ISP is having packet loss.

Okay. Now we’re proactively working with the ISP and creating a ticket to make sure that’s all, you know, being resolved, and then they can create then they can manipulate underlying path and all that stuff all from one single entity. So what that does, you know, not only you’re looking at bundling to save money across the board because, you know, the margin decreases on buying everything altogether, you know, the commercials we all bundle, but now you’re looking at it from a headache perspective. I only have to call one person no matter what the issue is.

I don’t care if it’s UCaaS issue, a network issue, an ISP issue. I’m calling one person for familiarity, and then they could troubleshoot all the way down the line. So as a business owner or for an IT staff, that’s simplicity, and that is decreasing headaches across the board to where I can continue doing other things and running the business.

Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff. So let’s move on to our next slide because, typically, when I have this conversation with advisers, this is what I get back.

I get the, hey. Well, look. My customers won’t pay for it. Right? My customers say it costs too much.

Adding these services, hey. I’ve only got the budget for a single circuit. Okay? And, yes, if we add SD WAN, if we add security, it does increase their monthly spend.

But here’s the question you’ve gotta ask. Compared to what? Okay? Compared to downtime, compared to recovery, compared to your internal IT team or you as the business owner’s individual time or compared to lost transactions.

Right? So, yes, maybe it costs you more on a monthly basis, but compare that to four hours offline.

Compare that to lost transactions. Now all of a sudden, you’ve gone from a sales converse from a sales conversation where you’re trying to selling things to a business outcome conversation. You are ensuring the business outcomes that they want. Alright? So this is an important objection and the one that most advisers get hung up on, but reframing that conversation is really key here. So let’s move on to our next slide.

And this is kind of where bundling becomes architecture. Right? In reality, we’re building a platform for our customers. Okay?

Network is the foundation and the entry point. We then bundle the platform architecture, things like resiliency, performance, voice for workflow optimization, whatever it is. That delivers outcomes, and then that delivers account value. The value for the customer, the value for the business.

So you’re not just selling add ons. You’re building stability for that business. You’re creating a platform for your customers where they can succeed within their business environment. So let’s go to the next slide and look at a couple of, bundling patterns that really work, and I think Kaufman did a great job of kinda walking us through a number of these.

The retail resilience bundle. Right? Primary Internet circuit, backup connectivity, SD WAN for POS and payment prioritization, and then basic security. Right?

What’s the outcome? Stores never go dark during business hours. We’re always handling transactions efficiently and effectively. Next bundling pattern, professional services.

Right? Things like lawyers, accountants, all these kind of things. Network plus UCaaS. Right? We really need that UCaaS bundle in there so they can talk to their customers.

SD WAN, and security. Outcomes, seamless hybrid work with a protected client data and consistent communications. And then finally, multilocation operations, SD WAN across all sites, centralized security, backup connectivity for critical locations, which provides a consistent experience and simplified management. So let’s look at this, the next slide here, Chandler.

Implementation, making this smooth. So what are the keys to bundling and to offering multiple solutions to your customers? It doesn’t mean forcing everything at once. Phase one, stability.

Right? Let’s make sure your operations are stable. Let’s make sure we’ve got your primary and your backup connectivity. Right?

Let’s make sure we’ve got your voice so that you can conduct business operations no matter what. Phase two, we’re gonna optimize it. Right? We’re gonna make sure your network, your resources are running as efficiently and effectively as possible through things like SD WAN.

And then phase three, we’re gonna protect it. Okay? We’re gonna make sure that all these things we put in place continue to operate, continue to manage your business effectively, etcetera. So, Kaufman, any thoughts on this?

I think this is the process that we love to see our advisers take, a phased approach into these customers, especially when you get resistance from your SMB and mid market buyers.

Yeah. There’s a big there’s a definitely a better approach rather than just give me your, you know, give me your connections, and then I’ll see how much money I can save you because there’s a lot more outcome driven conversations you can have there. And once you save them from a downtime situation or save them from some form of business impactful, you know, negative decision, then you’re sticky with that account. So if you take a phased rollout like this to where, hey.

Let’s look at what you have today. What are the possibilities that could that you can, you can go here? Good, better, best, you know, multiple different scenarios, and allow and guide them down a decision to where, hey. This is gonna minimize your risk.

This is gonna give you a little bit of risk, but it’s gonna save you x money, or here’s a like for like scenario on what you have today. And giving that advisement across the board, it gives you a much better conversation, a much deeper conversation with that customer to where we’ve seen that expand and upsell into other categories many times just because they see you truly care about the business. You’re not trying to be a hyper transactional person. And connectivity went from being a conversation to a transactional purchase over the last couple years, and now it’s actually coming back to being that first first interaction to where a customer actually tests an agent on how much value they can provide on this type of conversation because everybody can do it.

So who does it the best? And that’s where those agents that stick out are the ones that have that bundled implementation advisement conversation.

Yeah. I mean, you nailed it, Kaufman. Absolutely. Like, where do you as an adviser add value to the business?

And it’s no longer getting them the cheapest, fastest circuit. It’s about putting that together in a package that truly protects their business and, you showing you understand their business and create value for their business by offering them the proper solutions to deliver the outcomes they want. So let’s wrap things up here with a couple of things that you guys can take into your practice. Let’s go to the next slide there, Chandler.

So let’s position how do we position these bundles? Right? Instead of just talking about the products and services, we’re gonna change our language here a little bit. Right?

If we’re talking about a resiliency bundle, a con how long can you afford to be offline? Right? Instead of it just, hey. Let’s get you some backup circuit here.

Hey. How long can you afford to be offline? You know, hours, minutes, days. You’ll hear business owners say all the time, I can’t afford any downtime.

Okay. Great. Now that means a hundred percent. We need to add resiliency to your prop your package there.

Performance. Right?

Which apps can’t be slow? If your SaaS apps are running slowly, how do you prove where the issue actually is? Right? Which app applications do you require to make money?

And then, of course, what’s your security plan? What’s your recovery plan? If there’s a breach, if there’s an issue, what do you do to address that? Right?

And then finally, who’s coordinating these vendors today? Right? You’ve got multiple vendors. You’ve got multiple parties, going on in your organization.

Who’s coordinating that? Whose responsibility is it to coordinate all that? And, Chandler, let’s go to our final slide here before we go to questions.

The simple wrap up here, the takeaway for you guys, bundles are architecture. It’s not an upsell. Network starts the conversation. Bundling reduces friction and risk.

Okay? The outcomes that we are achieving for the business justify the incremental investment that they are making in products and services. And advisers that use this operating model that sell on value, sell on outcomes win versus those that just sell on price. So that is the bundling conversation, learning lessons from the quick service restaurant industry.

CAS, I know we got a couple of questions in there. I know we’re kinda tight on time, but maybe we got a time to tackle one or two.

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I have a three part question for you that came in, but I’d like to hear you guys’ opinions on it.

So one of the questions that we got was, can you explain what the difference is between SD WAN and a decent firewall that does what SD WAN does? Do we sell SD WAN around that? What does SD WAN do that firewall will not?

I’ll I’ll hand things over to the man, the myth, the legend, Kaufman, on that one. Kaufman, obviously, a question you get all the time.

Talk through where the differences between SD WAN and just a firewall come into play.

Yeah. It it’s a great question and also another misnomer. Like, SD WAN is not just a specific product. It’s more of a feature set.

So SD WAN is a loosely defined way of saying, hey. I can I can manipulate a WAN or multiple WAN connections using software? So that’s in the name, software defined wide area network. So is a firewall that can take two Internet connections failover and fail back?

Is that considered SD WAN? Yes. But it’s not purpose built for SD WAN to where you could leverage multiple connections at the same time, you know, depending on how quick you could failover and failback traffic.

A lot of the firewall vendors that start at firewall vendors enabled an SD WAN capable solution, but it’s not as powerful as an SD WAN driven solution like the the Broadcom, VeloClouds, the or the which is now Arista. You got, like, the SilverPeaks. You got the Versas. You know, they have a different SD WAN solution compared to the Fortinet and the Paolo that turned it on.

Paolo actually went out and made an acquisition to CloudGenix in order to have true SD WAN. So in order to come back and answer the question directly, yes, a firewall could be a viable solution if for an SD WAN conversation if they are okay with failover and failback. If they want the ability to leverage multiple connection at the same time or have a quicker failover technique or do something that SD WAN does on top of what that dual WAN capable firewall is doing, then an SD WAN is a prevalent conversation there. But the difference between SD WAN and that firewall from a security point, SD WAN allows you to generally have just a VPN connection.

It doesn’t give you the firewall components built into it. That’s where the SASE and SSE conversation comes in, Secure Access Service Edge and Secure Service Edge. So there’s a lot of Gartner terms that we’re throwing into that response, and I hope I didn’t clear up as mud. But, really, a firewall with dual end capabilities for a retail environment that has the updated technologies to where it can fail over and fail back may be a decent enough solution for that customer depending on their use case.

If they want something above and beyond, let’s talk SD WAN.

Yeah. And I think the the key there too for an SD WAN solution is that application prioritization. Right? We wanna make sure and that to me is really kinda table stakes for a lot of our customers when we start talking about business outcomes. Which applications are you relying on to make money, and can we make sure that those applications get access to the network resources they need safely and securely at all times?