Resources from Unified Communications

SkySwitch Taps SimpleWAN to Give Resellers More Visibility, Control

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

SkySwitch offers a full-featured UC platform that its partners can use to quickly and efficiently cater to the needs of businesses, including those in the hospitality space. The SkySwitch hosted white-label services enable interconnects, resellers, and VARs to transition more easily from selling traditional PBXs to extensive cloud-based UC solutions. But providing over-the-top voice solutions can become challenging for resellers when that traffic has to compete with other traffic on their customers’ networks. To address that concern, SkySwitch is leveraging SimpleWAN routers to provide its resellers with enhanced remote monitoring and diagnostic capabilities.

Eric Hernaez (News - Alert), president of SkySwitch, explains that the monitoring and traffic shaping the SimpleWAN solution brings to the table for resellers can enable them to assess the state of the network remotely, make adjustments (such as moving traffic to a different route) to ensure quality of service, and avoid costly truck rolls. That’s important, he said, given that resellers otherwise have no control over what else is happening at a given location in terms of traffic; for example, he illustrated, if a customer is running video on its network, that can adversely affect the performance of a reseller’s voice traffic.

“Our mission at SkySwitch is to help our resellers chart a course from launch of service to success as quickly as possible,” said Hernaez. “A large part of that equation is helping them solve the quality of service dilemma. Our partnership with SimpleWAN helps us to deliver on this mission by giving our resellers access to a QoS and monitoring solution that truly works.”

The SimpleWAN product sits at the customer premises but is managed as a cloud service, providing SkySwitch resellers the ability to easily manage and monitor traffic between the SkySwitch platform and their clients’ networks using a single interface. Among the specific parameters the solution delivers are detailed bandwidth graphs, historical reporting, latency measures, jitter information, mean opinion scores, and visual trace routes.

SimpleWAN is a player in the hot SD-WAN space. Businesses that leverage SD-WAN to see and control their networks in real time get a better handle on what’s happening at each of their sites, said SimpleWAN CEO Erik Knight.

“It’s bringing control to chaos, and that’s what they’re looking for,” said Knight.

The new SkySwitch solution has been available since April 3. SkySwitch has 60 resellers, which are located in the U.S. and Canada.