The Company, Product Category and Competition

AT&T is a multinational Conglomerate and world’s largest Telecommunications company. AT&T

offers many solutions to Consumers / Small – Large Enterprises / Federal / Other Service Providers.

One of the many solutions that AT&T offers is Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN). Software-
Defined WAN or SD-WAN is a way for Enterprise IT managers to migrate their complex traditional WAN
deployments into a less complex, easier to manage and still feature rich and flexible WAN deployment.

Customers are seeking ways to minimize their VPN costs. One of the cost reduction approaches customers
are exploring is replacing their VPN access and ports with less expensive Broadband Internet access as a
total replacement of or to supplement VPN access and ports. The use of Broadband Internet to
supplement or replace VPN access and ports is being facilitated by Customer Premise Equipment (CPE).
The CPE will make Dynamic, performance based routing decisions for the customer’s traffic with the
promise of comparable performance, security and reliability as traditional VPN networks.

Per IHS, Gartner and other Marketing reports there are 50+ SD-WAN vendors currently in market with 10+
major vendors Source: SDXCentral report

From competition perspective, SD-WAN feature list has reached near-peak and vendors are now
competing based on price, deployment models and service offerings.

AT&T is one of the Managed Service Provider (MSP) that is offering SD-WAN product as a service. The
service offerings are both B2B and B2C, offering the solution directly to end customers and also offering
the solution to Partners / System Integrators like IBM, Wipro, Tech Mahindra etc.

Existing Value Curve

For SD-WAN solution there are number of factors on which a solution is compared with competitors. Some
of the key competing factors are

1. Flexibility to Deploy - Ability to deploy the new technology on a per site basis. Not requiring
customer to roll-out to all sites at once
2. Built-in Resiliency: Offering automatic failover of network nodes in case of failure.
3. Virtualized Functions on CPE device – Customers are looking to reduce number of devices they
need to deploy at each branch / edge location. With Virtualization, a single device can be used to
perform multiple functions (Routing, Firewall, SD-WAN, WAN Optimization)
4. Centralized Management – Centralized Management of policies and functionalities of all edge
devices is key to SD-WAN solution
5. VPN / Dynamic Path Selection – Allowing customers to aggregate WAN connections and
dynamically choosing best optimized path for their network traffic
6. Cloud Gateway and Internet Offload – Offloading internet traffic at the edge of network without
traversing the MPLS private network.
7. Basic Firewall Embedded – Does the solution offers an integrated basic firewall for internet offload
traffic.
8. Cost Efficient – Overall cost efficiency of the solution, including product, service support and
network transport costs.
 The Value Strategy Curve is based on above key values that customers are looking for in a SD-
WAN solution.

6 Path Framework

Path One – Industry

The current industry in Small-Large Business / Healthcare / Public Service Customers / Energy
Customers.

Alternative Products for Industry – Alternative to SD-WAN is traditional VPN / MPLS products.

- Buyers trade across alternative products for cost efficient solution to manage branch locations.
For real-time application visibility, performance improvements.

Path Two – Strategic Group

What are the strategic groups in your industry?

Large Service Providers like Verizon, Level3, CenturyLink consist of the Strategic group for this
product and selling to industry.

Why do buyers trade up to the higher cost/quality groups, and why do they trade down
to the lower ones?
Customers / Buyers are primarily looking for a flexible solution that allows them to deploy at their
pace (consider a 500-site network to be deployed at once, customer would have nightmares deploying
this massive network in one shot). Customers are ready to pay more for flexibility of deployment.

Smaller customers with fewer (<10) sites may choose for lowest cost solution as they may not have large
number of sites to migrate.

Path Three – Chain of Buyers

What is the chain of purchasers/users/decision influencers in your industry?

There are multiple buyers for our industry

End Customer – End customer evaluates our product in Proof of Concept (POC) lab against
competitor’s product and selects the best solution for his needs

Partners / System Integrators – System Integrators like IBM, Tech Mahindra work with AT&T’s
POC team and certify products in their labs. They would deploy our products in end-customers network.
They would resell our product.

If you shifted the buyer group of your industry, could you create new value and unlock
new demand?
A different buyer group could be other Service Providers – if we resell our products via smaller
Service Providers we could reach to smaller markets where they have presence. This would also apply to
international customers where other Service Providers are leading.
Path Four – Complimentary Products and Services

Complimentary products would be Visibility and Analysis tools that would provide real time
information to customers about their branch /edge networks.

These products may not necessarily solve all the requirements of SD-WAN solution like Dynamic Path
Management and Use of Cheaper Broadband Internet.

Can you identify the pain points?

Customer pain points would be different vendors for management of branch device and transport
(Internet provider). Customers are looking for a single vendor to offer complete solution.

Path Five: Functional Emotional Orientation

Does your industry focus mostly on functionality or emotional appeal?

The product primarily focusses on Functionality, there is not much emotional appeal to the
product as this is not exposed to outside world. A Bank with 100 locations would not advertise which
internet provider or technology they are using to connect to other branches.

If the industry competes on functionality, what elements can be added to make it more
emotional?
Providing a smaller form factor of edge device (rack mounted option)/ Smarter Edge device that
would have features compatible with Alexa, Siri, Google Voice would add to emotional appeal to
customers.

Part Six: Time

Trends impacting SD-WAN Industry: Cloud Migration, First Responders Network

These trends would significantly increase customer base. As customer migrate to cloud based applications
(AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), they are increasingly looking to offload internet traffic at edge and secure
the traffic destined to cloud Apps.

Routers / devices placed in First Responders vehicles may need WAN failover, WAN Aggregation
capabilities (SD-WAN). SD-WAN would allow for WAN aggregation and increase in bandwidth allowing
for sharing videos, images, sensor data, calls and SMS in real time. Source - Lanner Blog.

Analysis and Four Factor Actions Framework:

Eliminate: Eliminate multi-vendor interoperability as not many customers are trying to mix multiple
vendors in their network.
Raise: Raise the ease and flexibility in deploying solutions to deploy the solutions per-site basis

Reduce: Reduce Architectural Complexity of the solution making it easier for novice users to deploy

Create: Add new functions to appeal at Emotional level (integration with Google Voice etc)

Reference entry

Wyatt Carlson (2017). Top SD-WAN Vendors Based on Revenue in Q1 2017. Retrieved from
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/top-sd-wan-vendors-based-revenue-q1-2017/2017/06/

8 SD-WAN Tends to look out for in 2018. Retrieved from https://www.lanner-america.com/blog/top-sd-

wan-trends-look-2018/