Agero supports nearly half of passenger vehicles on the road with Oracle SD-WAN

Agero is using Oracle enterprise communications technologies to safeguard drivers in more than 115 million vehicles in the U.S. When a driver is stranded roadside, time is of the essence. With Oracle, the company has achieved continuous contact center uptime, so customers can get the assistance they need and are back on the road as quickly as possible.

For 45 years, Agero has provided smart solutions for its clients and their drivers. Currently, Agero’s  roadside assistance, accident management and consumer affairs services are leveraged in the U.S. by drivers in two-thirds of new passenger vehicles, policyholders from nine of the top 15 auto insurance carriers and customers of a variety of other diversified clients. 

Oracle SD-WAN was created to solve the ongoing IT challenges network managers face every day—from expensive, sluggish, inflexible WANs to difficulties deploying new office WAN links and accessing cloud services. 

With Oracle SD-WAN, enterprises can benefit from internet economics, leverage high-bandwidth and inexpensive Internet connections, and safely migrate applications to the public cloud and SaaS at their own pace – without sacrificing the high availability and predictable application performance they expect from their MPLS-only WANs..

To maximize the quality of its customers’ experiences and to eliminate communication failures or downtime, Agero needed predictable enterprise communications performance and real-time application support. Agero selected Oracle for the failsafe reliability, security and interoperability.

“When drivers are stranded on the road in the winter, creating not only an uncomfortable situation but also a health and safety issue, it is crucial for our customers to get directly in contact with an agent,” said Robert Sullivan, vice president, technology and shared services, Agero. “Oracle has the best of breed technology in the Oracle SD-WAN and Enterprise Session Border Controllers, which have helped us to deliver high availability, reliability and quality of experience for our customers.”

Since working with Oracle and Presidio to implement the Oracle SD-WAN solution, Agero has reduced downtime and created special routing situations for sites without substantial circuit diversity. This advanced, “always-on performance” is invaluable to Agero as the company processes more than 12 million roadside and emergency support requests per year.

“Agero is reinventing how driver assistance is delivered, while elevating the consumer experience in often dire scenarios,” said Andrew Morawski, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications - Networks. “As enterprises demand flexible WAN solutions supporting shifting business requirements, Oracle is increasing and leveraging bandwidth for affordable and trusted WAN connectivity, anywhere and whenever it’s needed.”

In addition to the Oracle SD-WAN, Agero deployed Oracle 1100 Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) Oracle 3900 E-SBC and the Oracle Communications Converged Application Server (OCCAS) to protect its network and contact center from external threats.

Meriplex takes on SD-WAN; boosts network uptime and decreases MPLS-driven costs

Meriplex Communications announced that it has aligned with Dell EMC for a newly launched, SD-WAN solution powered by VMware. This collaborative SD-WAN solution will be desirable to enterprise organizations as it brings Dell EMC capabilities to the market coupled with a MSP partner.

With Meriplex delivered Dell EMC SD-WAN powered by VMware, organizations can increase network uptime and cut MPLS-driven costs, allowing for an effective approach of automation and intelligence to overcome constantly evolving network challenges. 

Organizations will leverage their investment in existing WAN infrastructure while taking advantage of the features and capabilities of SD-WAN. With business security requirements for modern enterprises ever evolving, end-to-end data security is the most valuable infrastructure component for conducting a robust digital business, connecting with customers, and driving business growth. SD-WAN protects organizations through enhanced centralized and next-gen firewall capabilities and the ability to integrate cloud security solutions. 

It also delivers speed to deploy new branch organizations with increasing M&A activity and organic growth, which is required to open and operate new branch locations. SD-WAN eliminates prolonged wait times for circuit installation turnups, and with zero-touch capabilities, technical expertise on site is not necessary, allowing branch locations to start running instantaneously.

As cloud-based applications increase the necessity for high network performance, organizations now expect better reliability, dexterity, and flexibility from their WAN to maximize the cloud's economies of scale. SD-WAN allows this transformational shift from rigid, outdated WAN architecture, to move SaaS applications into cloud environments, enhancing business growth and providing better QoS for end-users.

The DIY SD-WAN takes a copious amount of time away from an IT department's ability to focus on business-critical projects. Many lack the first-hand experience and expertise to configure complex network integrations. With a managed SD-WAN solution, organizations free up their technical resources for higher business priorities and rely on an MSP, like Meriplex, to proactively monitor and manage the network 24/7 with SD-WAN experts.

With Meriplex and Dell EMC, organizations can bundle these benefits for SD-WAN, including integrated cloud security, speedy branch deployment, and connectivity to the cloud, into one cost-effective, turnkey SD-WAN solution. Meriplex offers a unique, co-managed service that allows organizations to operate in tandem with Meriplex to gain complete visibility and control into their solution.

Frontier launches managed SD-WAN offering that eases the network digital transformation for enterprises

Frontier Communications announced Frontier Managed SD-WAN, its end-to-end, Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solution that provides WAN-wide visibility, agility, control and AWS Cloud integration. It also offers the enterprise customer a choice and puts them in control with either a fully managed or a co-managed model. 

Combined with SD-WAN Managed Private Network (SD-WAN EVPL), Frontier Managed SD-WAN is a powerful solution that simplifies network management operations, delivers enhanced service-levels (SLA) and offers a compelling alternative for enterprise customers looking to transition from complex, costly and static MPLS networks.

Through an intuitive user-friendly portal, the customer can implement WAN-wide configurations to reflect traffic conditions and business and application priorities. This feature alone puts the customer in control and results in the WAN delivering network performance and traffic optimization at the application level, based on the customer’s policy and priorities, all at the click of a mouse.

Frontier Managed SD-WAN supports all WAN underlay technologies, integrating seamlessly with traditional solutions. Its flexible, transport-agnostic design allows for a phased, at-your-own-pace migration without a large capex or downtime, while providing zero-touch provisioning for easy, agile network scaling.

The offering can be used for financial services by securing sensitive data with built-in protection measures and micro-segmentation of network traffic, while allowing remote access to protected information. For the manufacturing sector, it simplifies management and prioritization of network traffic, ensuring business-critical traffic has the best connection available.

The retail category allows organizations to get new stores up and running fast, providing smooth upgrade paths for future network additions and cloud migration of business-critical applications; while the entertainment sector prioritizes network activity for both critical and low-priority traffic, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

The education arena reduces IT costs while providing high-performing connectivity for students, administration and educators, enhancing online learning applications; and the healthcare segment provides full network visibility from a central location for WAN-wide control, prioritization, segmentation and control.

Featuring dynamic routing capability, Application Aware Routing (AAR) with 2000+ application signatures, Frontier’s Managed SD-WAN provides direct and secure access to the cloud as well as Frontier hardware redundancy to ensure network uptime and reliability. 

For enterprise customers, static network configurations have become too complex and unsustainable to meet the continued growth of cloud implementations and bandwidth demand driven by increasing mobile device use. The comprehensive new features of Frontier’s Managed SD-WAN address the needs of enterprise customers seeking to move to an agile digital networking model while maintaining security, performance, and resiliency.

With Frontier’s Managed SD-WAN, the customer can expect value from day one because the network will be fully visible; providing network insight including application bandwidth consumption, performance alerts, policy recommendations, business reporting and more. This powerful view enables the enterprise to make informed decisions based on actual data in near real-time.