Oracle’s Purchase of Talari Makes It the First Major Public Cloud Provider to Offer SD-WAN

There’s a huge trend for SD-WAN providers to tie into public clouds. But Oracle is the first major public cloud provider to offer SD-WAN, itself. It will be offering SD-WAN as part of its Oracle Communications’ business.In 2017 Oracle tried to create its own SD-WAN technology in house. It had some good components, including a voice-edge in the enterprise and analytics. But its customers were chomping at the bit. “We were going to roll it out as a SaaS,” said Doug Suriano, SVP and GM of Oracle Communications. “But we couldn’t get to market fast enough even with the installed base.”So in November, Oracle announced it was acquiring SD-WAN company Talari Networks, a vendor based in San Jose, California. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the transaction will be complete before the end of 2018. And all of Talari’s approximately 80 employees will join Oracle.Talari’s technology is expected to complement Oracle Communications’ session border controller (SBC) infrastructure. Suriano said Oracle’s SBCs are “the voice edge of an enterprise network,” and Talari’s SD-WAN technology provides the “data edge of an enterprise network.” He said both technologies can run on Oracle’s x86 devices at customer locations, and customers who want to run virtual functions on their own hardware will have that option as well. In addition to technical synergies, the two companies bring new customers to each other. Talari counted about 500 customers, mostly small- to medium-sized businesses. Oracle’s Suriano said, “I’m serving basically the Tier 1s and large global enterprises. It was a nice synergy.” Oracle’s direct sales force will now work to expand both groups of customers.