When did you first get a sense something big was happening to CenturyLink’s network?

I didn’t know it had even happened. My cell phone rang when the first customer called me. They didn’t have SD-WAN. He said, “Hey, Scott. Sorry to bother you, but is CenturyLink having a major problem, because we get our DNS from them and our DNS is down and now I’m starting to see our circuits drop.”

While I was on the phone with him, I saw an alert from CenturyLink pop up on my screen saying they had a major fiber cut somewhere. When a customer tells me their DNS is going down, that means something bigger than a breadbox is wrong. I knew this wasn’t a fiber cut. I did some digging and got the word out to every customer I knew that this was going on.

How did the outage affect your customers?

It was a disaster for the ones who didn’t have SD-WAN. That outage — and remember that was a global outage — killed their websites, it killed their toll-free services. Customers couldn’t even call them to report a repair ticket. Their email was down.

What were some of those initial calls like?

They were frantic calls for the people who didn’t have SD-WAN because the first thing they had to do was report it. When something goes wrong in an organization everyone points to IT and says “What did you do?” And then IT has to explain what’s going on.. When they could quickly point to CenturyLink and say it’s nothing we did, they were relieved but they were also like, okay, we’ve got to talk more about this because whatever we’re doing isn’t working.

What about the people who had SD-WAN already?

The people who had SD-WAN were totally relaxed. They weren’t affected in a negative way because, while they still had outages, their users didn’t know it. My contact at a large northwest based family drugstore said to me, “Scott, we can’t thank you enough. We see some CenturyLink services down but due to our Bigleaf SD-WAN, we don’t have a store down. Thank you for designing our network like this.” I got the same response from a large regional electrical parts retailer . I had those conversations all day long.

Second connections must have helped a lot of SD-WAN customers weather the storm.

Except for the ones who had put all of their network eggs into CenturyLink’s basket. I had heard through the grapevine that some customers had gone down as a whole regardless of their second connection because their SD-WAN was CenturyLink and CenturyLink’s platform went down. I purposely don’t pitch a behemoth as an SD-WAN for that very reason. I would prefer to have my customers know that they have two different connections from two different carriers and they have an independent party as their SD-WAN box and hopefully another independent party as their firewall.

It’s not just fiber cuts, though, right?

One of the reasons to have an SD-WAN is because of planned maintenance. Every carrier has them. They have to upgrade their software and their hardware. And customers have no control over when they occur. They are at the mercy of the carriers. If payroll’s going out, you can’t have a maintenance outage. But if you have a major carrier that says “Hey, we’re doing it anyway” well then you’re stuck from a business perspective. It’s a disaster.

I also remind companies that this latest CenturyLink outage happened three years ago, too. And Comcast had one last summer. And I went through who knows how many outages with Level3 before the merger with CenturyLink. There were probably six or seven a year that were nationwide.

Networks go down. If you’re a customer, it doesn’t matter if it’s because a squirrel chewed through the line or your carrier’s maintenance schedule conflicts with your business schedule. Down is down.

The business impact of an outage must be considerable.

CenturyLink had everybody down for 40 hours for the most part. I looked at one customer and I just said, you’ve got 17 sites that were down for 40 hours. How much business did you lose? Your SLA is going to get you $49 per store, but how much did you lose because you couldn’t sell, you couldn’t do any repair, you couldn’t do any marketing, you couldn’t do any business whatsoever. You had everybody sitting on their hands for 40 hours.

And the promise of an SLA does little in the heat of an outage.

Every single IT manager I work with does not want an SLA because they know that if their network goes down they get $5.70 because it’s prorated by the number of minutes you were down. And a $5.70 credit does not get your CEO off your back about an outage that shouldn’t have happened.

Any advice for IT managers on how to avoid the pain of these types of outages?

They have to find someone they trust, someone who has experienced these outages. Their carrier’s job is to sell them more services at the highest price possible. It’s not to help them fix whatever problem they are facing. Which means they need to find someone who can give them an independent analysis of what’s happening and present real business solutions based on the real world experience using those solutions.

Over the past three years, we’ve taken a somewhat contrarian view of the generally accepted definition and expectation of SD-WAN. While plenty of other SD-WAN providers have had great success positioning SD-WAN as an evolution of the traditional hub-and-spoke WAN, we saw a different value proposition for the Cloud-enabled businesses of today and tomorrow.

Becuase we’ve taken a path less-traveled, it’s that much more appreciated when someone else stands up and recognizes the value our unique approach brings to the market. That’s why we are so excited to announce our recent recognition as the Top SD-WAN Provider in 2017 by the Master Agent Telarus, LLC. This recognition is about the real world success of Telarus and their partners selling more Bigleaf SD-WAN services than any other SD-WAN provider in their portfolio.

Bigleaf Networks is the first SD-WAN explicitly built for today’s Cloud-enabled businesses. We believe that companies should be able to benefit from the speed, ease and flexibility of Cloud technologies without having to worry about outages and performance problems. That’s why we built an SD-WAN platform that’s powerful enough to work with every Cloud application and intelligent enough to identify internet performance issues and automatically adjust traffic patterns for new applications. That means your applications keep running the way they were intended and your users happy.

Bigleaf’s Cloud Access Network gives you an Enterprise-grade connection to any Cloud application your team wants to use. Our patent-pending intelligent platform reacts in real-time to new Cloud deployments and changing internet performance to ensure that your users’ cloud experience is always optimized. And Bigleaf deploys and scales easily to any number of locations or cloud applications without the need for manual configuration or policies.

Our contrarian view has been met with resistance from some in the industry, questioning how we are applying SD-WAN principles in our solution. We’ve always welcomed these debates and love sharing our position. We are proud of what we have built and the value we bring as the foundation of our customers’ cloud strategy.

We’re thankful and indebted to the Telarus community and our shared success. This is about partners and customer recognizing and benefit from a Cloud-first SD-WAN strategy. We are excited to grow our partnership and shared vision of what SD-WAN can bring to our mutual Cloud-enabled business customers, looking to purpose build connectivity to the Cloud.

Intermedia is hyper-focused on delivering easy-to-use and secure communication and collaboration solutions to SMBs and the partners that serve them. They have more than 110,000 business customers and 6,500 active partners, and their offerings include cloud voice, web/video/content sharing and conferencing, chat, presence, file backup, sync and share, business email, identity and access management, security, archiving, and more.

With Bigleaf, Intermedia customers using products like Intermedia Unite which integrates voice, file management can now ensure an uninterrupted application experience over any type of internet connection, regardless of changes in connection quality or outages.

Bigleaf is the perfect compliment for Intermedia’s Cloud-based UCaaS products. With Bigleaf, Intermedia customers enjoy:

VIP traffic status: Our Dynamic QoS feature prioritizes VoIP and other real-time traffic across commodity internet connections, even with varying bandwidth.

Intelligent load balancing: Automatically detects and adapts traffic in real-time to match application traffic needs to changing connection performance.

No dropped calls: Provides the benefits of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) without the hassle and cost. Applications stay connected when a circuit fails.

“Plug and play” install: Just plug in the router and update the firewall – everything works out-of-the-box, without changes to the existing security environment.

Jeff Burchett
Co-Founder & VP of Sales

According to Mark Sher, VP of Unified Communications Product and Marketing at Intermedia, “We want to make our products as easy as possible for partners to sell, provision, install, and support. This includes giving them the resources and options they need to be successful, such as our VoIP Scout network testing tool for use before the customer even signs up, telecom tax calculation, and now Bigleaf’s cloud-first SD-WAN.”

You can find more details in the official press release.

Intermedia is our third UCaaS partnership, and we look forward to many more in the future. If you’re an Intermedia partner and want to learn more about Bigleaf, feel free to reach out to your Intermedia Partner Account Manager at 888-299-2522. Otherwise, you can always contact us directly with any other questions.

Can SD-WAN be used as a vehicle to save your customer 15% on their current MPLS bill? Possibly, but focusing on SD-WAN as the “next evolution of MPLS” is very much a carrier-centric view. Carriers are heavily incented to push SD-WAN as an MPLS augmentation to protect their legacy base.

In the indirect channel, SD-WAN’s impact can go well beyond private networking design. In fact, it has the potential to unlock the value of an independent Telecom Agent, MSP or IT Consultant like no technology we’ve seen in recent memory. Here’s 3 examples of how this can play out:

Cloud Connectivity

First, the future of our industry’s growth is largely in the Cloud, not in legacy private networking architectures. This shouldn’t be seen as a threat to the Channel community, but rather an amazing opportunity. As we like to say here at Bigleaf, the Cloud is only as good as your connection to it. Who better to help customers build a cost-effective, intelligent, and robust access methodology to the Cloud than the Channel? With an SD-WAN-enabled Internet architecture in place, Telecom Agents, MSPs and IT Consultants are uniquely poised to not only help customers build the foundation of their Cloud strategy, but also grow into selling many of the Cloud services customers are looking to use down the road (hosted VoIP, VDI, AWS/Azure, Office 365, SaaS, etc.).

Carrier Neutral SD-WAN

Second, SD-WAN technology enables a carrier-diverse, physically-diverse Internet solution that no direct carrier rep can bring to the table. SD-WAN is the ultimate differentiator between the Direct and Indirect value proposition to the customer. Simply put, carrier reps will be motivated to leverage SD-WAN to retain and grow private networking architectures under their specific carrier platform. Telecom Agents, MSPs and IT Consultants will have the freedom to leverage SD-WAN in more creative and customer-friendly designs that provide best-of-breed solutions for Cloud access.

The Power of Bundling VoIP with SD-WAN

Third, while the carriers’ SD-WAN offerings are designed to chase large and complex private WANs, there’s a tremendous opportunity down-market in the SMB/Mid-Market space to grow revenue and scale. A recent Computer Economics study cited that SMB and Mid-Market businesses are adopting SaaS applications nearly twice as fast as large Enterprises. SD-WAN should be the channel’s foundation and pull-through to sell Cloud and SaaS services. It can be added to every Internet quote, every VoIP quote, and every Cloud quote to turn dumb Internet pipes into intelligent platforms that ensure the performance of key business applications. And the quoting/sales process can be kept very simple with common-sense phrasing and language (e.g., “VoIP prioritization and seamless failover”). In short, we’re combating the race to zero on bandwidth pricing by evangelizing the concept of more intelligent (Cloud-ready) and carrier/physically diverse Internet environments.

At Bigleaf Networks, we see an incredibly unique fit between SD-WAN and the Channel. It’s why we made the decision from the very beginning of our company to go to market exclusively through the Channel. SD-WAN’s greatest potential is unlocked through a carrier agnostic, circuit agnostic environment where the power and efficiencies of the Cloud takes center stage – it’s a perfect storm of new technology and opportunity for our Channel Partners.

Managed service provider Bigleaf Networks is expanding its reach into the channel by partnering with a couple of telecommunications master agents, allowing many solution providers and their customers to access much-needed VoIP and cloud performance optimization services, according to Bigleaf.

Bigleaf Networks offers a managed service that optimizes performance of VoIP services and cloud-based applications through intelligent load balancing across multiple Internet connections. Founded in 2012, Bigleaf sells its offering to customers exclusively through the channel.

The company currently has about 35 solution provider partners and is looking for more, according to Bigleaf’s CEO, Joel Mulkey. The Portland, Ore.-based MSP has signed on as a supplier partner with master agents Intelisys and X4. The partnerships will allow each master agent’s expansive network of sale partners to access Bigleaf’s services, and Bigleaf will be able to reach thousands of solution providers and cloud providers they wouldn’t have access to otherwise, Mulkey said.

“Our goal is to identify partners that are engaged in the ideal scenario that we fit into — partners that have customers that have migrated to, or are migrating to, cloud services that their business depends on,” he said.

To read the rest of the story at CRN, please click here.

Looking ahead to our first trade show next week, I am amazed by the number decisions that face today’s IT decision makers. At just this show, there are more than 200 vendors for telecommunication services alone! While it makes for an exciting time to be in tech, it must be a little intimidating for the people who have to evaluate all of these options and make decisions.

For a startup like Bigleaf, one of our biggest challenges is how do we stick out amongst all of these options. We’ve worked very hard to build powerful technology capable of creating real value for our target market. But how do people find us? What do we want to be known for? Why will people care?

These are obviously big questions that warrant a lot of time and effort to fully answer. We grapple with them every single day. We have however; found a guiding principle that we know will drive our success.

Bigleaf is “embarrassingly easy” to work with.

If we will be anything to customers, partners, and prospects, we will be embarrassingly easy to work with. We will be one of the easiest decisions today’s that these people will have to make. We will not be hard to work with. We will not be hard to sell. We will not be hard to install. We will not be hard to support. We will be embarrassingly easy to work with.

So what does that mean? Well, here’s what it means to us today.

Embarrassingly Easy to Sell – We are committed to bringing our services to our customers via the partner channel. We’ve worked in the channel in the past and we know that the best partners have a lot of options to put in front of their customers. We also know if selling our services or ordering our services is complicated, then we don’t stand a chance of building a strong working relationship with those partners. We have to be so easy to sell that we are included on every Internet, VoIP, SaaS, and Cloud proposal they put in front if their customers.

Embarrassingly Easy to Install – Tech today is “on demand”. The market not only requires the most powerful technology, they also expect it to work with the least amount of effort. Look at procuring a server 10 years ago, versus spinning up an instance at AWS today. To make life easier on our partners and customers, our installation process has to be the “AWS” of Internet optimization. There can’t be a complicated process that only a handful “certified” people understand. Bigleaf works, right out of the box every single time. If you can plug in an Ethernet cord, you should yourself a “Bigleaf Certified” installer.

Embarrassingly Easy to Use – We (and when I say we, I mean people a lot smarter than me at Bigleaf) have built a very powerful tool to maximize the performance, reliability, and value of a customer’s internet connections and the traffic that relies on those connections. The power of the application lies in the automatic adaptation to both the performance of the Internet circuits and the requirements of the customer’s traffic. The platform is constantly adapting itself to ensure the best performance for customers. A customer can simply “set it and forget it” when it comes to Bigleaf. The only time a user should feel the need to make a change is when they add or change ISP services.

Embarrassingly Easy to Support –Many of today’s IT directors, consultants, or administrators thrive on self-service tools. They need tools that empower them to find and fix a problem on their own time. Calling somebody and waiting on hold doesn’t work in their world. Bigleaf is very proud of the web portal we’ve created for our customers to view real-time performance of their Internet connections. Furthermore, we’ve adapted that same portal to be utilized by both our partners and their partners alike. With all the being said, we also know that sometimes you really just need to talk to someone. That’s why we are also staffed 24x7x365 to help.

So that’s where we are starting. What can you expect from us moving forward? We are committed to not only getting better at everything above, but to also push ourselves to find more ways to be embarrassingly easy to work with. If you’ve got an ideas, or think we can do any of this better, let us know. We are here to make things embarrassingly easy for you!

As I have mentioned in the past, Bigleaf has some really smart people on the team. They also have me – a salesperson. Most of the time, our smart people are doing smart things to make Bigleaf better. However, they also spend some quality time, explaining how we do what we do to me – a salesperson.

So, in honor of their efforts, I want to share what they’ve taught me about what makes Bigleaf unique, in terms a sales person can use. If you want a more technical overview of each feature, click on the feature name.

Same IP Address Failover

This mean not only does outbound traffic leverage both connections, but inbound traffic does too. With Same IP Address Failover, a VoIP call or VPN pointed at a public IP address can be moved from one circuit to the other without interrupting the session. The customer could be in the middle of a phone call, lose one of their internet connections to a failure, and still keep the call up and running without interruption.

Intelligent Load Balancing

This is about maximizing performance and value of both the customers Internet connections and their cloud-based applications. Though many people like the idea of a redundant Internet connection, nobody likes paying for something they hope to never use. With Intelligent Load Balancing, not only do we eliminate the idea of redundancy, we make sure that customers are using always each Internet connection for its ideal purpose. We match each type of customer traffic to whichever circuit is best for that type of traffic at the exact moment. No more primary and secondary circuits, just optimized Internet and maximized value.

Dynamic QoS

This is the game changer when we talk to VoIP providers. For years VoIP providers have had to face the dilemma of provisioning services via private circuits or Over-the-Top of a customers existing Internet circuit(s). Private circuits ensured quality and performance because the provider could use QoS. However, the expense of these private circuits significantly increased their service delivery costs. Conversely, Over-the-Top provisioning kept the providers price point down to a competitive level, but sacrificed QoS and its performance benefits. With Dynamic QoS, that dilemma disappears. Bigleaf can provide Over-the-Top value with QoS performance.

Plug-and-Play Provisioning

Don’t get me wrong, we come from the telco world and know how important field techs the entire Internet ecosystem. They are great people, who work really hard. However, it’s nice to not have to always rely on them. It’s nice to know our customers agree. Bigleaf is ready to work right out of the box. There is no need for to dispatch a tech or have a “certified” engineer involved in our installation process. Each Bigleaf router comes with a 2-page, each to follow, install guide. The entire process was designed with me in mind. If I can install it, then we are success. So, if you can plug in an Ethernet cord, you should yourself a “Bigleaf Certified” installer.

So there you have the sales perspective on what the smart guys have taught me. If you are more interested in what the smart guys have to say, please link from each feature to on overview page, or even better give us a call. They’d love to chat!

When Joel first approached me about his Bigleaf concept, one of the first things that came to my mind was the channel. It seemed like such an obvious fit. The channel would be more aware of the potential in a solution like Bigleaf, as well as the demand from customers looking to build redundancy into their networks.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best people in the telecom channel. I had seen how they have leveraged the freedom and choice that channel has to build value for their customers and success for their businesses. I knew that if we built Bigleaf with the channel in mind, these same people could leverage Bigleaf with similar success.

The channel creates a unique value for a startup like Bigleaf. Whereas an established carrier may only look at the channel as a “cheaper” way to sell its products, the channel creates foundational value for us. The channel is a more than just a sales tool, it’s a sales, marketing, and customer success foundation.

As a startup, our early challenges lie in market awareness and customer reach. Who better to see the value that Bigleaf creates, including reliability, performance, and independence, then the channel? Furthermore, who better to tell our story than the best salespeople in the telecom industry? Members of the channel are the experts that our potential customers look to when they need a solution their problems.

Furthermore, the channel creates unique synergies between Bigleaf and other providers that would take us years to do on our own. While I spend months talking other service providers (VoIP, SaaS, Cloud, or Internet), trying to convince them that working with us will create mutual value. A single agent can prove that value by selling Bigleaf alongside these provider’s services. In many ways, the channel legitimizes our value.

The Channel will Love Bigleaf

Likewise, we believe that we provide a great deal of value to the channel too. We don’t see this as a one-sided relationship. We are an important addition to the portfolio of every agent in the market.

The telecom market is getting tougher and tougher for agents each day. Price compression and commoditization of traditional Internet services have forced many agents to look beyond traditional telecom to grow their business. Fortunately, SaaS and the Cloud create a whole new avenue for longevity and success in the channel. However, this untapped growth and success is heavily dependent on those same Internet circuits that are getting cheaper and in many instances less reliable.

This is where Bigleaf creates value for our channel partners. Bigleaf not only addresses technical problems created by unreliable Internet solutions, we solve real business problems for today’s agent.

First off, Bigleaf creates the need for at least one additional Internet circuit for every customer – leading to increased revenue. Secondly, with Bigleaf in place, these same customers are insulated from performance-based issues and outages on their Internet circuits – limiting customer support. Finally, with Bigleaf’s traffic optimization tools, like Same IP Failover, Application-Aware Load-Balancing, and Dynamic QoS, each customer has the optimal environment to deploy cloud-based services.

Bigleaf is committed to build and grow with our channel partners. It’s exciting to be in the front row for some of the most interesting evolutions in telecom and tech industries. It’ll be even better to have our friends in the channel sitting next to us.