We are a solution provider and Cisco SD-WAN is one of the products that we implement for our customers. I am a pre-sales engineer and help with the consultancy.
The idea of SD-WAN is very good and it's efficient.
You get security, all of the service you need, and it's easy to deploy.
It is a feature-rich product with a lot of components.
Cisco products are a little bit complicated, so making them a little bit easier would be an improvement. The installation is easy but having many components, and the integration with other components, is a little bit complex compared to other products and other vendors.
I have been working with Cisco SD-WAN for one or two years.
This is definitely a stable product.
It is a scalable product and it can also be integrated with other Cisco products such as NSO (Network Services Orchestrator) and the virtual CPE. The customers for this product are enterprise-level companies.
The Cisco technical support is excellent.
Prior to this solution, we used Cisco iWAN.
The initial setup is easy to do. I'm not sure of how long it takes to deploy, but it is not very complex and if all of the requirements are met then it should be straightforward.
We deploy this product for our clients.
Cisco is more expensive than some competing products.
We have compared Cisco with all of the vendors such as Fortinet and Talari. I believe that Cisco is the best, overall. It is not the cheapest, but it is the best both technically and support-wise.
With respect to other vendors, they have different strengths. For example, Fortinet is coming from a security background so they have quite a good product with a secure firewall on it. However, they lack some of the SD-WAN functionalities. I believe the routing part is still being done on the CPE, whereas with Cisco, it's done on the orchestrator.
Overall, I don't know how other vendors can compete with Cisco, and that is partly because of the integration that Cisco has with all of its products. It gives them a big edge.
Cisco is a company that has been in this market for quite a long time. They have a stable office, stable software, and all of the features are there. Having the SD-WAN on top of the routers they have has given them an advantage. Plus, they have a wide range of products and there is integration between all of them and SD-WAN.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.