Highlight to support Cisco Meraki SD-WAN services

Highlight has added support for Cisco Meraki SD-WAN for its service assurance platform, giving service providers the ability to provide a valuable managed service on top of SD-WAN technology and its underlying network. With complete visibility of all network services on a single pane of glass, the Highlight platform enables conversations between provider and enterprise around a transparent and integrated SD-WAN service based on trust.

As a launch partner for the Highlight platform’s Meraki integration, Maintel has chosen Highlight as the SD-WAN service assurance tool alongside its managed Cisco Meraki solutions.  With its easy-to-understand view across the whole network, including SD-WANs, underlying connectivity, and LAN WiFi, Maintel has usable and timely insights to facilitate its customers’ business needs. 

Highlight’s new integration enables end-to-end service assurance, and lets Service Providers and their customers see health, stability and load across both their Meraki overlay networks, and underlay connectivity on which the SD-WAN relies, such as 4G/5G cellular, Broadband and Ethernet. They can also bring in LAN elements such as WiFi and Ethernet switching, with the platform’s new Grid View feature visualising these alongside the WAN to enhance the managed service further and provide a total, top-down picture.

Businesses transitioning from MPLS networks to SD-WAN are also well catered for. Highlight’s long-established functionality that visualises Class of Service prioritisation and VLAN segmentation can also be viewed alongside SD-WAN, giving the service provider and customer continuity of service and transparency while the network is migrated.

Martin Saunders, Product Director at Highlight says, “SD-WAN demand is rapidly growing. According to Current Analysis, SD-WAN powered networks are likely to account for 25% of all connectivity revenue for service providers in three years’ time. In the face of this growing demand and competition, it is important providers demonstrate that their SD-WAN solution actually does deliver on its promises. Vendors have created some great SD-WAN portals that show useful information for a single enterprise, but the portals are only focused on their own technology, with no view of other vendor technologies or the underlying networks.

“Critically, the SD-WAN portals are also not designed for service providers. They cannot manage the multiple levels of commercial relationship and the secure multi-tenancy structure required by providers. Our new service takes data from the Meraki SD-WAN dashboard and combines it with data from underlying connectivity services, enabling service providers to set contractual SLA targets, thresholds, and alerts, and then report against these measures, all with complete transparency to the end customer. This increases the relevance and efficiency of communication between the two and builds trust on both sides.”

Paul Bulmer, Director of Product Management at Maintel says, “Maintel is uniquely positioned in the marketplace as a service provider with strong demonstrable experience in both networks and  cloud communications technologies. Providing a valued managed service is core to our proposition, so we're delighted to be partnering with Highlight and their Service Assurance Platform for both our ICON Underlay connectivity services and now our comprehensive managed SD-WAN services.

“Together with Highlight we're delivering a service that takes all the worry away from the customer in running and depending on an advanced network, giving them the freedom to focus on what's important to them, their business.”