Fusion Broadband, Australia's first SD-WAN provider, has been offering SD-WAN services for nearly 10 years. These services deliver faster speeds, failover protection and redundancy to private networks at lower cost.
More managed service providers in Australia use Fusion Broadband's SD-WAN platform than any other SD-WAN provider, and rapid growth meant a major network upgrade would be required.
Fusion Broadband's managing director Jason Maude said: "We were receiving more support calls purely through load and growth constraints. Changes had to be made.
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He added "Now 80% of our SD-WAN network is spread across IBM sites in Sydney and Melbourne along with other IBM locations. We also allow our clients to build their own SD-WAN network in the IBM Cloud anywhere in the world."
This approach allows Fusion Broadband's customers and partners build and control their own networks.
"They can even integrate these networks into their own IBM Cloud infrastructure," said Maude.
"It's completely compartmentalised, which is important from a data sovereignty and data protection standpoint."
From Fusion Broadband's perspective, IBM Cloud provides huge CPU scalability and a significant amount of headroom in network capacity.
"Our own management requirements have reduced with support calls dropping significantly. Because we're running the infrastructure at 20% instead of 80%, we've got a much more robust environment."
It has also allowed Fusion Broadband to reach new markets and customers.
"With our SD-WAN platform being well-tested and proven in the IBM environment, we are now making it available to over 200 IBM Business Partners globally, which is increasing our international reach considerably," said Maude.
"We can turn on a point-of-presence in an IBM Cloud data centre anywhere in the world in about half an hour. And outside of shipping out our end-point equipment, we can have a customer running on a global proprietary private network in less than 24 hours. We think that's pretty impressive."
This speed of deployment helped win business from am unspecified Australian bank.
"It was perfect timing," said Fusion Broadband SD-WAN specialist John Soden.
"We were in talks with a bank when they started having network issues and several of their sites were going to be down for weeks. We were able to have them back up and live in about 20 minutes."
In addition, Fusion's new network delivers a lower cost environment for the bank, leading to noticeable savings. "They told me that the cost savings from replacing their network in just one of their branches funded the replacement for seven other sites," he said.