Silver Peak Strikes SD-WAN Gold With $90M Investment

It's going to be a long, hot summer for SD-WAN vendors, as competition boils up and Cisco, VMware and others stir the pot. But Silver Peak just got 90 million ways to keep cool.

The networking vendor, which bills itself as a "broadband and hybrid WAN" provider, received a $90 million investment from investor TCV, which has previously backed a few companies you may have heard of, such as Airbnb, Netflix, Splunk, Spotify and Zillow.

Previously, Silver Peak Systems Inc. received $80 million in funding, making this F round the company's biggest yet.

Silver Peak focuses on helping enterprises adapt their WANs to the cloud-first environment, providing end-to-end quality of service regardless of underlying transport, David Hughes, Silver Peak founder and CEO, tells Light Reading. Enterprises can move entirely to the Internet for connectivity and don't need to use MPLS, though they can continue using MPLS if they choose to.

Additionally, network operators can control routing on an application basis. Data can travel direct to the Internet from a branch -- which is usually the best route for traffic to and from business applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce -- or through a firewall service like Zscaler, or through a full security stack in the enterprise data center, Hughes says.

Silver Peak implements intent-based networking, allowing operators to focus on desired behavior of the network as a whole, without having to program individual devices by CLI.

— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading

This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on Telco Transformation's sister site, Light Reading. To see the full story, click here.