Software-defined wide area networking is getting a lot of press. Some claim it’s the skeleton key to a number of vexing information-technology puzzles, like multicloud and internet of things, for example. Is there a way businesses can cut through the hype and find out if SD-WAN is really for them?

“There is a lot of noise out there,” said Dave Twinam (pictured, left), director of systems engineering SD-WAN, VeloCloud Business Unit, at VMware Inc. The many vendors — including VMware — bringing SD-WAN solutions to market may not be dumb about the topic. But it might be preferable to hear from enterprise-IT practitioners actually using it day in, day out.

“You don’t understand what the implementation’s going to be like until you’re in it,” said Rosa Lear (pictured, right), director of marketing of the VeloCloud Business Unit at VMware.

Twinam and Lear spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the VMworld event in San Francisco (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Real-world pros stop being polite

Available guides to SD-WAN tend to give the reader a broad, surface-level view of the technology. Twinam and Lear wanted to delve deeper. Along with 12 collaborators, they produced “SD-WAN 1:1: The What, Why and How.” The book draws on experiences from professionals in the field working with SD-WAN.

“It’s not some guy sitting in an ivory tower talking about what you should do. This is actually what you should do, because this is the best practice; this is what we hear from customers; this is what works best for all the people that have implemented SD-WAN,” Lear said.

The book also addresses questions about how SD-WAN solves real business problems. It’s approachable to executives who aren’t exactly devout networking nerds, according to Twinam.

“The reality is we’re not solving technical problems just to solve technical problems. We’re solving them to actually meet the needs of the business. So kind of seeing both sides and how they come together is critical to it, and I think that’s something we tried hard to put into the book,” Twinam concluded. 

With the acquisition of VeloCloud Networks Inc., VMware now leads the SD-WAN market.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE