At last month's MEF18 conference in Los Angeles, AT&T Vice President of Edge Solutions Josh Goodell cautioned that despite its recent popularity, SD-WAN is not a "one-and-done" technology. It's important for service providers, he says, to help their customers understand their use of SD-WAN.
"Anyone that believes that this is simply plug and play and walk away is misled," Goodell said during his keynote at the conference. "There are definitely challenges that you've got to work through as you're deploying these services across the globe. What are the elements of the solution that a customer can expect?"
Goodell says it's important to help customers understand that a transition to SD-WAN will involve multiple phases and cannot be done overnight.
"I'd say the last thing on the deployment complexity that has been a key learning is understanding the actual applications that are being used on the network," he said. "It's a matter of understanding all of these elements then building a sequenced plan and then rolling that out over time. It is not trivial but it does work and it's been amazing to see the adoption of these capabilities."