Video – Bigleaf Networks

[Video] See Bigleaf Home Office prioritize business app traffic

Amy Chan — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 15:30:56 +0000

Quality of Service (QoS) prioritization is like what medical professionals have said about social distancing, “It’s working when the possible problems don’t seem to be problems.”

In Bigleaf’s world, that means that when your business applications—like Zoom—are running smoothly without problem or issue, even when you’re running a host of other streaming apps, like Netflix or YouTube, your QoS is doing its job.

But how do you really know for sure? Well, we thought we’d show you.

Play Video

In this quick video we recorded, you’ll see us simultaneously run a Zoom session, play a YouTube video, and stream live TV broadcast on DirecTV on our computer—to replicate the traffic a household can get while you’re working from home. Then, you’ll see us flood the rest of connection with traffic by running a speed test to show how Zoom keeps working great even when we’ve maxed out its throughput capacity.

What you will notice is that there are no issues with the Zoom call—that both the voice and video work smoothly even while the internet connection they were running through was being hammered with non-business related traffic.

In addition to the video, you can see in the associated Bigleaf traffic optimization dashboard, how the number of high priority packets protected increased during the streaming of the apps and the speed test—representing how Bigleaf Home Office prioritizes your business traffic and your key applications will work with the reliability and quality that you need them to have.

High-priority packets protected before flooding the circuit with traffic.

High-priority packets protected after flooding the circuit with traffic.

[Video] Making Sense of Your SD-WAN Options w/ WatchGuard and Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 23:17:06 +0000

In a crowded and sometimes confusing SD-WAN market, it’s easy for partners and end-users to get lost in the mix. Every SD-WAN vendor has its strengths and unique value. But all the hyperbole and marketing terminology makes it hard to choose the right SD-WAN for your needs.

We want to try something different…

That’s why we partnered with WatchGuard for a 60-minute webinar titled SD-WAN: One Size Doesn’t Fit All. In this presentation Bigleaf’s Co-founder, Jeff Burchett, and WatchGuard VP of Product Management, Brendan Patterson, walked through the most common use cases for SD-WAN and how to choose the right solution for each of them. They covered:

What SD-WAN technology is and why it matters
How SD-WAN is used in example use cases
Which SD-WAN scenarios you need to consider before deploying
How to make SD-WAN work for your business needs

As an industry-leading security vendor, Bigleaf has partnered with WatchGuard as part of their WatchGuardONE program. But, WatchGuard also offers their own SD-WAN functionality. That dynamic of coopetition presented a unique opportunity to drop the hype and simply present you with two completely different approaches to SD-WAN—each with its own use cases and benefits.

You can watch the full recording any time. If you have any questions, or if you’d like to learn more about Bigleaf and/or WatchGuard’s approach to SD-WAN, contact us today.

Introducing Bigleaf’s arch nemesis… The Circuit Destroyer

Amy Chan — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 16:28:17 +0000

Every hero needs a great villain. This month, the world finally met Bigleaf’s nemesis at Channel Partners Expo in Las Vegas. Its name? The Circuit Destroyer.

The Circuit Destroyer is Bigleaf’s evil twin, a router that’s been modified to make internet connections perform badly. With the Circuit Destroyer, we’re able to simulate not only outages, but any level of throughput, packet loss, latency and jitter. That means we can replicate the internet conditions that our customers face every day. Then we can show exactly how Bigleaf’s SD-WAN deals with those conditions to ensure uninterrupted application availability and performance.

Our CEO and Founder, Joel Mulkey, was on hand at the event to demo Bigleaf vs the Circuit Destroyer. Lucky for us, the cameras were rolling…

Does it feel like you’ve got a Circuit Destroyer in your internet? Request a 30-minute demo today and learn how Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN can improve your internet and provide seamless performance for all of your applications.

Onward Communications fixes UCaaS call quality with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 18:44:08 +0000

Onward Communications fixes UCaaS call quality with Bigleaf

Tricia Ward of Onward Communications had just moved one of her large, multisite customers to a hosted voice service when call quality issues threatened to derail the deployment. The customer had moved from MPLS to fiber internet with redundant circuits at all sites.

The carriers couldn’t explain the voice issues, and the UCaaS vendor was reporting great MOS scores. No one could figure out why the customer was experiencing call quality issues or how to solve the problem.

That’s when Tricia brought in Bigleaf Networks to track down the problem, solve it, and ensure that it didn’t happen again. Tricia sat down to tell us the whole story, and the cameras were rolling.

Video Transcript

Tricia: So, the customer I’d like to talk about is a transportation logistics firm that I’ve been working with for about the past seven years. They were on a legacy MPLS network. They were growing. They were acquiring new locations, and they really wanted me to come in and look at improving the network and helping them with their applications across all their locations.

We had just installed the network, all fiber, now we were installing hosted voice, and as part that endeavor, we decided that we should probably put in some redundancy. We also put in various cable circuits and fixed wireless circuits across the country.

So the customer has a great network. Now, it’s robust. It’s going to meet their needs.

They’re operating across the hosted voice platform and they start having issues. They start having a lot of dropped calls. They start having latency, jitter, all of the things you don’t want to have happen in your voice network.

We turned in trouble tickets with the carriers and the carrier said, “Oh no, there’s nothing wrong with our network.”

We turned in trouble tickets with the UCaaS provider and they said, “No, we have great MOS scores.”

The customers said, “Well, it’s not our local area network because we know that works.”

We were almost at our wit’s end. I thought about what I could do, and I had a relationship with a company in Portland by the name of Bigleaf. I knew their product fairly well and I knew that they had a portion of their product that dealt with analytics.

Jeff: Bigleaf is an SD-WAN service provider with a very specific focus on purpose-built connectivity to the cloud. Customers moving line of business applications to cloud and SaaS environments and helping them architect their network accordingly.

Tricia did reach out. She reached out to us, not asking, “Can your SD-WAN fix this?” but rather “I have a problem. Can you guys help?”

We get these calls from partners from time to time where there’s a problem and it’s obvious what the one thing is. There’s something wrong where the partner needs help and the customer needs help.

What can we do? Our attitude was there was gonna be one of two outcomes. The perfect outcome would we could just drop in Bigleaf’s service and the problems would go away. But we felt from what she was describing that probably wasn’t going to the case. There was going to more to it than that.

We felt it important to be very transparent and honest front in saying, “Here’s what we think we can do.” and, more importantly, “Here’s what we think we can see.”

Nobody really knew if this was a LAN issue, an internet issue, a voice provider issue. We felt that if we could get in the middle of it we could use SD-WAN, hopefully, to fix the problem, but more importantly to identify where these things are happening and who needs to take responsibility for what to get ultimately to resolution at the end the day.

Tricia: So we got a Bigleaf demo unit into their location. Talked through the process. Put it in place, and all of the sudden it was as though a light turned on. They had actual statistics that were helping prove out the various problems in the network, and it turns out it wasn’t just one problem.

Jeff: It wasn’t any one person’s fault. It wasn’t any one thing. We were able to identify some issues coming out of network. We could point to the customers and say, “Hey we see this. Can you work on that?”

We were able to identify some issues on the circuits which was hard data that could be taken back to the carrier and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing. Can you work on that?”

And we were also able to identify issues between the carrier and the voice provider and say, “Hey guys, it looks like there’s a problem over here. How do we fix this? How do we get this all together?”

And nobody was sitting there saying, “This isn’t my fault. It’s your fault.” It was, “how do we get this fixed? How do we make the customer happy at the of the day?”

Tricia: It just completely transformed the experience that the customer was having, so much so that they bought Bigleaf for every location without even thinking about it.

Jeff: To a certain degree, not fixing the problem immediately made for a better relationship. Working side-by-side with everyone involved, we were able to put everybody on even ground and ultimately show our value beyond just a single service you drop in at one location to fix one little thing.

Tricia: Everybody who wouldn’t take ownership before all of a sudden had evidence standing in front of them and said, “Oh we better take some ownership of this problem.” And so today they have all locations operating with primary internet connection with their secondary network connection for redundancy and a Bigleaf router in-between, managing and monitoring what’s happening in their network. And they look at those statistics daily. I know that for a fact.

Jeff: You need to think of support when you’re thinking of service. They go hand in hand. In my experience, the best relationships have come out of challenging situations. You need to be able to take the opportunity to help someone, to really drive the relationship home, and create more value long-term.

Tricia: With the support Bigleaf gave and with the tenacity that they attacked the problem, it has really transformed the customer’s business. And in fact, they did not replace anything in the solution. They were just able to make the necessary tweaks. To make the solution right.

[Video] How Bigleaf SD-WAN improves Office 365 adoption and experience

Amy Chan — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:52:27 +0000

This month, we headed up to Seattle, WA to talk at Microsoft’s Machine Learning and Data Science conference about Bigleaf’s unique SD-WAN approach and how we’re helping improve Office 365 adoption and experience. Our founder and CEO, Joel Mulkey, was there to help explain why companies using Office 365 are rethinking their network architecture as more and more of their business technologies are moving to the Cloud.

Fortunately for us, the cameras were rolling…

Video Transcript

Hi. I’m Joel Mulkey, founder and CEO of Bigleaf networks. The world of business is in the middle of a massive shift right now. The cloud is taking over, and Office 365 is driving much of that. However, the connection between users and the cloud is preventing adoption in many cases. IT leaders are scared to deploy the great applications that folks like you were building. There are two main reasons for that.

The first is that the internet connection connecting to the cloud is unpredictable. We monitor thousands of internet connections all over and based on that data, we see that each internet connection on average experiences three and a half hours of downtime in given month. On top of that, if the connection up, it’s not necessarily healthy. You’ll see there are twenty-three hours of unhealthy time where the circuit is basically unusable.

The second major issue is that networks aren’t keeping up with the cloud revolution. Users are able to bring apps into their environment at any time, and Enterprise networks are built on static network policies. That’s a collision where the network is just simply not able to adapt as users procure and deploy these applications.

The cloud requires a new kind network, a new kind of Internet. One that’s smarter. That’s Bigleaf. Bigleaf has deployed software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to hundreds of mutual business customers. Those are Microsoft customers who are getting the application experience the developers intended because the network is no longer in the way.

Let me talk you through what this looks like.

Bigleaf is built into the internet backbone, the core of the internet. We also own and operate our own core Network. We deploy routers and servers and data centers all over.

We peer that network with hundreds of different networks, including [Microsoft’s]. We then deploy a small router at each customer location and between those endpoints we run our intelligent network software. This platform gives full visibility and control over the whole internet path ensuring that the application user is getting the experience that they should. Because we own this network, we peer it with over a thousand different Cloud applications. This means no matter what the user’s using, whether it’s a Microsoft app or something else, they get a consistent experience this what they were expecting.

Now want talk to you through four areas that we’re innovating in network today. The first is, when you deploy Network Technology, it needs to be easy to implement. Otherwise, it won’t be used. Bigleaf is simple. Our router drops in in between the customer’s firewall and their internet connections. That connects back to our core Network and that’s it. We don’t touch the LAN. We don’t touch the security. We simply focus on internet reliability and performance.

The second area is reliability. Users are expecting a very real-time experience today. If you’re on a key phone call and it drops, or even if it’s glitchy, people upset. Or, if you’ve got a video, you’re streaming and it picks the lates people wonder what’s wrong with the application or what’s wrong with the network. At Bigleaf, we address this through intelligent software that inspects each internet connection ten times second, gathering huge amounts of data on packet loss latency, jitter and capacity. We then take that data and make real-time routing decisions on it to keep the user experience great. You can think of it like a genius network engineer who has access to statistics on the whole internet path end-to-end, and who never takes any restroom breaks, never takes a day off and commits no errors.

The third area is flexibility. The problem with networks built on static policies, like much of today’s Network Technology, is that they don’t adapt to the continual evolution in applications where users are adding things constantly. At Bigleaf we believe users shouldn’t have to worry about how to make their network deal with new applications. So we use intelligent software that automatically identifies those applications through algorithms and heuristics and classifies them into six different categories. We then take that traffic end-to-end across the internet and prioritize it even when it’s congested our users get the best possible application experience without having to manually configure their Network.

The fourth area I want to touch on is autonomy. Autonomous software is very exciting. You’re all here because of that. What we see in the networking space is that it can be applicable to take away the low-level details of managing how to implement the network and releases people to focus more on the outcome that they really want. When I look at autonomous software, I see that it tends to sit in this Sweet Spot somewhere between full manual control and full automation in network software and routing technology.

Like what we do. You can automate it pretty heavily and have that be successful. That’s because computers are better than humans at real-time network monitoring and routing decisions. And the scope of the problem is small enough that you can build autonomous software effectively to accomplish things. Networks built on autonomous software means that administrators are happy because their networks behave like they intended them to, even when conditions change, and users are happy because their applications work right all the time. Bigleaf customers are happy customers.

We make their applications behave like they were intended with our direct peering to Microsoft network and our automatic classification of all types of cloud traffic. Bigleaf is the best way to connect to Office 365. If you want to learn more or talk about how we can work together. Please see me the back afterward. Thank you.

Bigleaf’s 90-Second Installation

Jeff Burchett — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 19:51:40 +0000

For the past year, we’ve been proving how important SD-WAN is and how easy Bigleaf makes it. Frankly, Bigleaf is the easiest way to leverage SD-WAN, without the hassle of replacing firewalls.

In the spirit of “embarrassingly easy”, here’s a quick video showing a Bigleaf installation into an existing firewall in less than 90 seconds.