SDN Africa and Aryaka Team Up to Provide Accelerated Cloud Access to Enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa

MILPITAS, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 7, 2015) - Aryaka®, the leading WAN as-a-Service company, announced today that it has entered into a strategic partnership with SDN Africa to offer optimized network connectivity and application acceleration to companies in sub-Saharan Africa that access cloud services.

SDN Africa is a company founded by highly experienced telco, WAN Optimization, and SDN technology and sales executives. They plan to focus on SDN-centric technologies, especially cloud access optimization solutions, for the sub-Saharan market.

Cloud service adoption has reached a tipping point in the South African market with most medium-to-large enterprises having already adopted at least one enterprise SaaS or PaaS offering from leading providers such as Microsoft (Azure, Office 365), Amazon (AWS), Google, or Salesforce.com. Unfortunately, Sub-Saharan Africa remains geographically challenged, and therefore, businesses accessing cloud applications over the Internet encounter performance challenges. A few solutions have emerged in the market to address these performance challenges.

Microsoft Azure, for instance, has an ExpressRoute partnership in place with a few MPLS providers. Enterprises purchasing Azure ExpressRoute, however, are typically advised by suppliers to couple the solution with high-end WAN optimization. This requirement has resulted in a boom for leading vendors of WAN optimization equipment, but a hole in the pocket of the typical CIO.

"Moving to cloud services, from a networking perspective -- is effectively like globalizing your business," said Brett Steingo, CEO of SDN Africa and formerly Innovation and Technology Manager at Internet Solutions. "You suddenly have a network branch -- possibly your most important branch -- based in London or the US and you need to ensure optimal performance between that location and the rest of your users."

The partnership with Aryaka provides SDN Africa customers with a cost-effective, cloud-based alternative to legacy solutions such as MPLS and WAN Optimization appliances. With Aryaka's WAN Optimization as-a-Service, enterprises can instantly connect to any branch office location or cloud service, and benefit from enterprise-grade private connectivity with built-in WAN Optimization. By connecting to Aryaka's POP in Johannesburg, businesses in sub-Saharan Africa can leverage optimized private connectivity to public, private, and hybrid cloud services, thus enabling better performance and higher enterprise productivity. Aryaka also has technology partnerships in place with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which enhances their cloud acceleration capabilities even further.