Better together? Absolutely.

What’s possible with SD-WAN

The SD-WAN market is hot. As SD-WAN matures, adoption rates are increasing and enterprises are reevaluating their networking priorities and deployment decisions.

As enterprises advance their digital transformations, they are starting to better understand SD-WAN’s strengths and best use cases. Customers are adopting SD-WAN, both to gain better application performance and have more flexibility in connectivity choices. Also, SD-WAN is paving the way to enable and optimize the hottest up-and-coming technologies – one being 5G. 

Last year, AT&T and VMware announced plans to implement 5G capabilities into AT&T SD-WAN with VMware. This transformative combination of SD-WAN with 5G enabled by AT&T Wireless Broadband is an ideal solution for businesses looking for a high-speed, low-latency 5G network connection. 5G provides customers a diverse connectivity option, supports higher bandwidth, and enables faster deployment timelines – a revolutionary combination that will accelerate SD-WAN adoption.

The result is a simple, elegant, and differentiated customer experience that provides rapid connectivity through an integrated AT&T Wireless Broadband solution with AT&T SD-WAN with VMware.

AT&T SD-WAN with AT&T Wireless Broadband

To that effect, AT&T is bundling AT&T SD-WAN with AT&T Wireless Broadband. By combining these services, our customers benefit from transport resiliency, high speed, and low latency, while leveraging SD-WAN Dynamic Multi-Path Optimization and AT&T Dynamic Traffic Management capabilities for traffic prioritization of mission-critical applications running smoothly on mobile networks.

AT&T Wireless Broadband is available in speeds from 8-50Mbps. This solution offers customers a quick setup with unlimited data and no overage charges. It can be used as a primary data connection for remote sites or as a secondary or failover connection to support business-critical applications. As new business applications, visitor connectivity, and connected devices require greater bandwidth, it’s more important than ever to make sure business-critical functions don’t get interrupted. 

An excellent use case

AT&T worked with a leading retailer to facilitate their digital transformation. Retailers, who are often limited in their connectivity options at their remote sites, need highly secure and highly reliable connectivity for services like point-of-sales (POS) systems, pop-up shops, and digital signage. 

This customer required support for their in-store tablets with Point-of-Sale (POS) applications and help during the holidays to quickly enable their pop-up shops and new locations. The solution was to deploy AT&T SD-WAN with VMware using AT&T Wireless Broadband as their primary connection and a wireless modem with a third-party SIM as their secondary connection.

“Because we are joining with VMware, customers have access to an elegant and streamlined end-to-end networking solution with a tremendous amount of flexibility,” said Josh Goodell, Vice President AT&T Edge Solutions. “We can better our customer’s experience, while driving mobility as a quick and simple access type for use cases such as pop-up retail locations and mobile offices.”

The customer benefits by having an SD-WAN solution that securely routes critical POS traffic during mobile retail events intelligently between the two carrier-diverse mobility links. This solution also provides a simple and quick service turn-up and redundancy through mobility for their pop-up stores and mobile offices. As an added bonus, AT&T managed services replaced the need for this retailer to maintain a large IT staff.

Furthering the adoption of AT&T Wireless Broadband

AT&T and VMware are working together to integrate an AT&T SIM card into VMware LTE-enabled devices, essentially making mobility access a feature of the SD-WAN service, all managed by AT&T. With this solution, we can rapidly enable connectivity via an integrated AT&T Wireless Broadband solution, which allows customers to quickly set up new locations. This quick and easy enablement enhances our customers’ experience.

“AT&T and VMware have long collaborated to deliver best-in-class solutions,” says Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM of VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. “We are collectively enabling customers to derive even more value out of their networks. The speed of business is accelerating, and without SD-WAN and the AT&T offerings, companies will be left behind.”

A great time to innovate

Collaboration drives innovation, and AT&T and VMware are just getting started. Platform evolution drives innovative new customer use cases which in turn drives modernization and transformation.