“Help me, Vocus Solution Consultant. You’re my only hope understanding why I need a SD-WAN thingy”

End of calendar year is always a time of business pressure, particularly in product management teams where the “1H” roadmap commitments are called in. Ahead of a well-earned break for the team it has been satisfying to see a range of Vocus SD-WAN improvements and enhancements land in the last few weeks

A neat enhancement the team have delivered on recently has been our Vocus SD-WAN customer demonstration network

Having been involved in a more than a few such builds in my career, typically located at customer experience centres or similar, it was refreshing to see the team think a little differently. The team considered not only the challenges in the present environment of customers getting into to city for such demonstrations but also that if you are going to demo something, maybe you should use it in your day-to-day life

Obviously we have built the Vocus SD-WAN customer demo network to showcase the benefits of our solution, helping our customers understand what they can achieve with SD-WAN. Key capabilities covered in our demonstration include our Customer Portal which provides insights into the health, networking and security status of the solution including connectivity services linking the customer’s sites. Customers can also use this portal under a co-management model to make changes such as application control, traffic steering and security policies. Our Analyzer tool supports deeper insights into the network with full historical logs

The day-to-day life aspect of our demo network is remarkably simple, but I think powerful. The sites in our demo network are Vocus Edge devices, owned and managed by our Solution Consultants, deployed in their homes

Our demo network supports our Solution Consultants in showcasing the benefits of our solution via a live demonstration but also ensures that our technical pre-sales experts keep across, intimately, all the latest features of our SD-WAN solution, keeping our customers completely up to date with the newest innovations

Having our edge device fronting your home broadband is not without technical competency pressure of course. If I change a setting at home and stuff our broadband up, I am more unpopular than usual, so the pressure is indeed on our SC’s to know exactly what they are doing 😊

There is of course more to achieve and do with this network. Next steps, with the involvement and support of our partners, include running competitions with prizes for our best SC demo and the development of simplified processes to onboard new Solution Consultants onto the network

Want to know more?. Contact your Vocus Account Manager who most definitely will put you in touch with your Solution Consultant

Note/Disclaimer: Yes, my wife will not let me put anything on the end of our broadband that I might stuff up … they do however make good footrests