Sona Business Now Offers SD-WAN: The Ultimate Network Solution

Background

Sona has set itself the target of becoming the world leader in advanced commercial IP solutions for communication. The company’s operations currently extend beyond the Netherlands to Belgium and the UK. “The whole world is digitalising, and organisations are always looking for ways to improve the speed and quality of their network,” explains Sona founder Sonia Harjani. “SDN (Software Defined Networking) is a solution that helps companies with this: a modern and flexible connectivity solution that is particular useful to organisations with multiple establishments.” SD-WANs (Software Defined Wide Area Networks) offer a range of different options for establishing simple, secure and cheap connections with separate establishments, data centres and the cloud. This is an exciting development in a world where hybrid working is becoming increasingly popular and more and more users are switching to cloud services.

“As a wholesale provider, we were eager to add an SD-WAN solution to our portfolio and offer it to our channel partners.”

The solution

The company had already been dealing with Huawei for years. “We were very pleased with their storage products. Now for the SD-WAN service we wanted a partner to not only supply the software solution, but also provide the necessary hardware. The solution is easy to implement, and the support that Huawei offers is exactly what we need. Another factor that’s a big plus these days: the products are available immediately.”

Result

Now Sona’s channel partners can offer their clients Huawei’s SD-WAN solution, in a very smart way to control their network traffic. The solution makes it easy for clients to decide whether to run a particular connection over the WAN or over the Internet, or to filter network traffic and prioritise specific flows of traffic. A centralised dashboard makes configuration very simple.

“Our partners are becoming more and more aware of these kinds of solutions. They’re not familiar with all the ins and outs, though, so we provide the extra support. We describe a series of scenarios to advise on the ideal solution. It’s not an out-of-the-box product: it’s a flexible solution that must be customised to meet each client’s own specific requirements.”

Previously, network configurations all had to be programmed manually. “You had to update the routers at all your various locations one by one. Now literally all it takes is one click. This gives network administrators much more control of what’s happening everywhere in the network, and saves them time to focus on other work.”

Looking back, what are SONA’s thoughts about the partnership?

“Our earlier experiences were already positive, and we’re very happy with this new partnership too,’’ Sonia Harjani continues. “Huawei doesn’t see us as just a number but as a true client relation. They do whatever it takes to give us the support that we need. When we had a tricky issue that they couldn’t sort out in the Netherlands or Europe, they brought in the R&D department in China to fix the problem. Within a couple of days, it was solved. If this was another vendor, it could have easily taken months to be fixed.”