Who doesn’t like cloud-based plug-and-play software as a service applications? Nobody. And who doesn’t have a flawless internet connection they can depend on to always run them at maximum speed with no hiccups? Well, a lot of folks don’t, it turns out. This is where internet-overlay wide-area networking for optimized SaaS delivery comes in. It’s part of the trend toward flexible, software-defined networking that mirrors the on-demand scalability of cloud compute and storage.

While the internet is many things — lots of them wonderful for businesses — its traffic routing system is less than ideal. 

“It’s not really built for reliability, consistency and consistent speed,” said Saar Gillai (pictured), chief executive officer of Teridion Technologies Ltd.

The internet doesn’t seek the speediest route for traffic, but rather the cheapest one. This means that one internet-service provider will shift traffic to a peer provider that will accept it for the lowest rate. The performance end users get is pretty much left to chance; it might be fantastic or monumentally frustrating. Despite what some believe, caching cannot help much — especially when it comes to the highly dynamic tasks SaaS users perform, according to Gillai.

“If you’re doing something in Salesforce, that’s very dynamic; it’s not cached,” he said.

Gillai spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in our Palo Alto, California, location. They discussed SaaS applications in enterprises and how cloud is transforming network connectivity. 

SaaS is the largest segment within the entire cloud market, with revenue expected to grow 22.2 percent and reach $73.6 billion this year, according to a report from Gartner Inc. SaaS will reach 45 percent of total application software spending by 2021.

Clearly, a lot of enterprises are enthusiastic about the ease of SaaS applications, but relying on an unpredictable internet connection for  business-critical processes remains off-putting to some.

Filing into the fast lane

Teridion is a four-year-old startup that wants to end the musical-chairs game for SaaS apps that rely on an internet connection. It’s basically an overlay network on top of the public cloud surface area.

“Traditionally, the way people did things is, they would build a network themselves. But today, the public cloud guys obviously are spending gazillions of dollars building infrastructure,” Gillai said. “Why not leverage it the same way that you buy CPUs [from cloud providers]? Why buy routers?”

Teridion partners with more than 20 cloud providers, ranging from major hyperscalers, like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform, to smaller startups, like Digital Ocean Inc. It has put thousands of sensors, AKA measurement agents, all along these providers’ network fabrics. The agents gather real-time data on the performance of all available routes. 

“We monitor internet conditions, and then we build a fast path for your packets from wherever the customer is to your service, thereby dramatically increasing the speed, but also providing much higher reliability,” Gillai said. It creates “soft routers” as needed to handle varying capacity.

Teridion’s SaaS-provider customers can leverage this network overlay to guarantee a consistently fast, reliable connection to its end users. “They really need to focus on making their app as good as possible and advancing it and making it as sophisticated as possible,” Gillai stated. “The problem is then there’s this last edge … from their server all the way to the customer they don’t really control, but that is really important to the customer experience.”

Teridion gives them control over this aspect of the user’s experience. In the U.S., Teridion typically improves speed by about three to five times, according to Gillai. In other territories, like China, for example, it may be up to 15 times faster.

Brave new network

Teridion is not the only vendor to hit on the bright idea of infusing the network with the agility of cloud. Lately, a lot of companies are renovating outmoded, rigid networks into new, software-defined animals that fit into the modern infrastructure scene. In fact, we can all forget about achieving true multicloud or intercloud without a totally software-defined, virtual network, according to Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of VMware Inc.

“The old model of networking doesn’t work,” he recently told theCUBE. “It must all be done from a software level. That means conceiving a globally distributed control plan that allows you to span multiple clouds and data centers anywhere on the planet. That’s the core of our virtual cloud network strategy.”

A host of startups have splashed into the market claiming to simplify complex feats vexing techies today, from multicloud to internet of things edge computing. Addressing such issues becomes much more feasible with SD-WAN.

“With the right SD-WAN philosophy, there is no difference between a branch, a laptop at a hotel, a data center, Azure or Google or Amazon,” said Hansang Bae, chief technology officer of Riverbed Technology Inc. They are all just connectivity points along the larger network fabric, he told theCUBE. This makes SD-WAN suitable for multicloud management, IoT, and application-defined networking, he added.

Reworking the network as a scalable resource will make life much simpler for businesses — much the way cloud compute power has, Gillai pointed out. Previously, “you had to buy the strongest server you needed for the end of the month, because maybe the finance guys needed to run something,” he said. Now, “you just go to public cloud, and when it’s the end of the month, you get more CPUs.”

Teridion is applying the same logic to network connectivity, and because it’s cloud-based, users get both convenience and the most advanced technology available, according to Gillai. “Why would I go build a network when the public cloud is investing $100 billion a year in building massive infrastructure?” he concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE