How I Pivoted into SD-WAN
From Chaos to Opportunity in the Market
Late in the previous decade, I found myself knee-deep in the trenches of a major telecommunications company, brought on as a contractor to evaluate their processes. The gig seemed straightforward at first, dissect why their deployment & operations costs were skyrocketing past revenue, leaving the business teetering on the edge. Little did I know, this would be the spark that ignited my journey into SD-WAN, transforming a frustrating consulting stint into the foundation of my own venture.
I started on the deployment side, where the heart of the inefficiency pulsed. Everything was manual, human-driven, & precariously balanced on massive Excel spreadsheets that sprawled like digital labyrinths. Running a multimillion-dollar telecommunications operation on Excel? It was pure hell, error-prone, unscalable, and a breeding ground for mistakes. This setup bloated their HR costs with teams of people hunched over screens, manually inputting data, cross-referencing orders, and chasing down discrepancies. All the time, the CEO would be storming up & down the floors, shouting blue murder as clients contacted him directly as orders stalled. Worse still, there was zero revenue assurance. No system to validate that a service order for a network link to an operator had a corresponding invoice to the client. They were paying bills blind, trusting that everything matched up. Spot checks I ran revealed the ugly truth: links being paid for that weren’t even in use, or services delivered without ever being invoiced. Ghosting! It was like throwing money into a black hole, and the company was hemorrhaging because of it.
My first move was to advocate for ditching the spreadsheets in favor of a web-based workflow application tailored for telecommunications, one that could automate approvals, track orders in real-time, and integrate billing seamlessly. But the resistance was fierce, almost visceral. No one wanted change. The processes lived in the heads of the people running them manually, and they clung to that knowledge like job security. “Pfft,” I’d think, as they pushed back, did they really believe their manual expertise would save them in a digital world? This mindset wasn’t just outdated; it was sinking the ship. Automating would free up resources, reduce errors, and let the team focus on growth, but fear of being replaced by a machine blinded them to the bigger picture.
Diving deeper into deployment, the lack of automation was glaring. Links were provisioned entirely by hand, engineers rolling out to sites, logging into Cisco routers via clunky CLI interfaces on MPLS networks, typing commands line by line. It was labor-intensive & time-sucking, with no orchestration tools to streamline configurations or deployments. A single setup could take days, involving multiple handoffs, site visits, and inevitable human errors that led to downtime or rework. In an industry where speed & reliability are everything, this manual grind was far from optimal, it drove up costs, delayed rollouts, & left no room for scalability as customer demands grew.
Shifting gears, I turned to the service desk and operations, where chaos reigned supreme. Tickets poured in daily, overwhelming the agents and creating an eternal backlog. They’d resort to bulk-closing old ones just to clear the queue, regardless of resolution, a band-aid on a gaping wound. Digging into the data, I pinpointed the major culprit: the highest volume of tickets stemmed from link failures in redundant setups. The company sold customers two links for failover reliability, but if one went down, the customer had to log a ticket. Then an engineer would manually log in, diagnose, & swap circuits, a tedious, reactive process that ate hours and frustrated everyone involved.
That’s when I started hunting for a better way, & I stumbled upon SD-WAN, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking. It was a revelation. SD-WAN overlays intelligent software on top of existing networks, centralizing control and automating traffic management across multiple links. For deployment, it eliminates the need for manual CLI tinkering; instead, you define policies once in an orchestrator, & it pushes configurations automatically to edge devices, slashing setup times from days to minutes and reducing human error. Operationally, it shines in handling redundancy: SD-WAN monitors link health in real-time, dynamically rerouting traffic over the best available path without intervention. No more tickets for circuit swaps, the system self-heals, balancing loads, optimizing performance, and even prioritizing applications based on business needs. It solves the revenue assurance gap too, by integrating with billing systems for automated validation, ensuring every link is accounted for and invoiced properly. In essence, SD-WAN turns a brittle, manual MPLS setup into an agile, automated beast, cutting costs, boosting uptime, & freeing engineers for strategic work.
Excited, I evaluated a few solutions, eventually connecting with Fusion, which later rebranded to Nepean Networks. Their approach resonated, robust, scalable, and geared toward telecommunications pain points. By the time I was ready to pitch the full migration off MPLS to SD-WAN, fate intervened: the company folded under its own weight, a victim of the very inefficiencies I’d been uncovering.
But I wasn’t done. With the telecommunications giant gone, I saw the opportunity staring back at me. Why not take the reins myself? That’s how my SD-WAN journey truly began, not as a consultant fixing someone else’s mess, but as an entrepreneur building solutions from the ground up. It was a pivot born of frustration, insight, and a bit of serendipity, proving that sometimes, the end of one chapter is just the setup for the next.
Many service providers are still in the same boat, having saved some costs by moving from Cisco to Mikrotik, but not resolving the causation & grinding away in the trenches as above.
