How Coevolve is enabling software-defined architectures for mid-tier multinational companies in APAC

For Tim Sullivan, Co-founder and CEO of Coevolve, AI is creating traffic pattern changes that need the network to be dimensioned, capable and secure to be able to handle that change.

A leading global provider of telco-independent SD-WAAN, SASE, cloud and multi-cloud networking solutions to enterprises, Coevolve continues to enhance its focus on the Southeast Asian region as the Australian solutions provider and MSP believes that there is a massive opportunity to support mid-tier multinational companies in the region in their software-defined architectures.

Founded in Australia over a decade ago, Tim Sullivan, Co-founder and CEO of Coevolve explained to CRN Asia in an interview that the company decided to have a laser focus on mid-tier multinational companies in the region as these companies can benefit the most on software-defined architectures.

“We knew that these software-defined architectures would really be super beneficial for multinationals. And particularly in Asia, the telco infrastructure and the state of the market is quite disparate. It's not homogenous. The quality of the connectivity that you've got in locations in Vietnam for manufacturing or Indonesia or wherever it may be really does vary a lot. So, we could see that that sort of one unified software-defined layer across a disparate range of internet connectivity choices, as companies particularly started to move away from private bandwidth because it was too expensive and slow and inflexible, that the whole shape of these enterprise networks had to change,” he said.

Today, Coevolve has grown globally with Southeast Asia being one of the core initial markets and remains important to the company’s journey.

“We've got sites under management now in 82 countries around the world for our multinational clients. There is about 800 telcos and ISPs in that sort of underlay of connectivity that we're coming in over the top, not just with the software-defined layer, but also our workflow of managed services through the deployment phase, the management phase, and then the optimized phase,” he added.

Working with vendors

According to Sullivan, Coevolve works with a number of vendors for its SDWAN services. The journey started in 2014 with VeloCloud with Coevolve rolling out the first multinational network using SD-WAN globally in mid-2015 for a manufacturer who had sites across 13 countries, including 11 of those up in Asia.

VeloCloud was acquired by VMware Broadcom and now has been sold to Arista Networks, which Sullivan believes will be a very good home for VeloCloud because that's still a very key partner for Coevolve.

“What the VeloCloud acquisition does for them is rounds out their portfolio. They started in the data center and do a lot of work with the cloud hyperscalers They've really made a lot of traction on the campus networking, but the one piece that was missing for them as an end-to-end networking portfolio at Aristo was that wide area network, or that SD-WAN piece. So, now that Aristo has acquired Velo Cloud, that really rounds out the portfolio,” Sullivan explained.

For a partner like Coevolve, Sullivan feels that the changes fits well with their strategy to be able to go further and not just do the wide area networking and the security, but particularly as they get a notion of software-defined branch and some of the other switches and Wi-Fi access points collapsing into that SD-WAN router.

“For partners like us, who are long-term VeloCloud partners, we think they'll bring a real quality focus, an R&D focus, and we can already see their roadmaps really pumping for what's coming next with their portfolio, including now VeloCloud. So, we feel that the future's really bright for VeloCloud under Aristo.”

Another vendor Coevolve works with is Cato Networks which Sullivan believes is the category-defining company of SASE, when they founded the business in 2015. Coevolve worked with them, deploying networks to not just the developed countries, but developing markets like China and Saudi Arabia.

“That's a real global footprint, that sort of highly dispersed set of sites or offices or factories or remote workers, professional services businesses as well, quite a good profile for us, where they're really paranoid about the IP of their business and the security aspects there, as well as then the productivity of their employees, wherever they may be, on the client side or working from home or wherever they may be,” he explained.

Sullivan also highlighted that Cato Networks have grown really significantly as well.

“They're sort of a real challenger to those sorts of more established players. They've built a really interesting business as the sort of the portfolio, the category-defining company for SASE. But it's really about the lifecycle for us. So, whilst we really value those vendor partnerships, we work very closely to sort of maximize them for these big multinational clients,” he said.

Apart from that, Coevolve also partners with Zscaler, and has Equinix and GNX as connectivity and infrastructure partners.

“We've done some work with Equinix, for example, where we can use some of their network fabric and network edge and put some of the SD-WAN infrastructure virtualized into their data centers. So, there's sort of adjacencies around those core vendor partners as well,” he said.

For Sullivan, as Coevolve is dealing with some of the best vendors on the planet, they are leveraging the best of the platform. This includes having to integrate multiple platforms. For example, integrating Arista VeloCloud with Zscaler to provide a dual-vendor SASE or zero-trust architecture.

“On top of that, you want to be able to have one visibility of those different tools and that end-to-end landscape, including the, the workflow that needs to go around that to activate that site or to do ongoing change management, reporting. So there's a whole raft of activities in the workflow that needs to sit across this network. And some of these networks change very dynamically,” he explained.

This is where Coevolve has built out its smart services proposition.

“We deliberately didn't put AI in the label. But really what that does is it captures all of the analytics and alerting and automations and AI enablement through those workflows, whether it's at the design phase, the build phase, the run phase, or even the optimized phase, then as the tech keeps changing and the business keeps changing.”

“So that set of smart services, we're collecting about 21 billion data points every single month across the networks that we manage, which spans across 82 countries today. There's a vast amount of analytical insights and actionable insights that we can share with our clients because we've got that position sitting across the top of that architecture. So that's our own investment and our own capability,” he said.

Evolving customer needs

With customer requirements varying by company and sectors, there is a wide range of requirements. However, what’s paramount for all of these is security.

According to Sullivan, cybersecurity pressures and the ongoing threat landscape always sort of must be in the top priorities. They're looking for business agility as they're rolling out various different business transformation, digital initiatives. With a lot of AI initiatives, Coevolve is already seeing the traffic on the networks change again and that will continue to change.

“If you consider an enterprise with 15,000 employees and users on the network creating traffic now, there's how many agents that are going to be creating traffic to traverse that network. So, that agility and adaptability to be able to roll out those initiatives, whatever they may be, that business agility remains core as well. So, I feel like they're top of mind and then how that translates to a manufacturing environment or a construction environment will vary as well. I think the proliferation of devices at the edge, be it IoT, be it agents and other AI-enabled traffic, small language models potentially at the edge where it's not just data going back to the center but being created and managed locally there, close to the edge as well where there's a pipeline for maintenance type checking or whatever it may be.”

Sullivan also believes that there'll be all sorts of interesting use cases coming up that is going to see a whole change of traffic patterns across these networks.

“If I look at it globally, US companies tend to do a lot of in-house management. So they'll inevitably hire contractors to help do the work. There are still activities through the lifecycle need to happen regardless. Whereas the European companies at the other end of that spectrum tend to procure a managed service. So they're much more likely, the enterprises headquartered out of EMEA to want more of a white gloves, end-to-end level of managed service,” he explained.

However, in APAC, Sullivan pointed out that the region is sort of between both of that.

“APAC is not as DIY as the US, not as fully managed as Europe and perhaps more in between. We sort of see in the terms of adoption, we definitely saw the US adoption for SD-WAN and SaaS being the earliest. Particularly if there was in-house teams, a lot of the vendors there were in Silicon Valley. They sort of had close rapport and their CTO co-founder is based over there. So he's very close to all of the vendor community over there. So that sort of saw a lot of early adoption in the USA. Australia, that was a couple of years after. Maybe two years sort of behind the USA if I could sort of crudely characterize it like that,” he said.

With Southeast Asia behind the level of adoption in Australia, Coevolve was able to take the benefit of some of those early learnings from the US into the Australian clients, and some of the early adoption lessons from the US and Australia into places like Southeast Asia.

“We've had teams on the ground in Southeast Asia since we founded the business in 2014. So that's always been a super important region for us and our multinational clients, clearly Asia's been the powerhouse of the global economy really. So it's a very important region. But adoption again changes,” he said.

Sullivan pointed out that Singapore would probably be ahead of the curve compared to Malaysia or Thailand or Indonesia perhaps. And then the local telco infrastructure, the local cloud infrastructure sort of varies quite considerably as well. For him, its sort of having a party of who can sort of use the technology to sort of iron out some of those disparate dynamics in the different regions, but be able to sort of provide a more unified service.

Customers in AAPC want simplification, but Sullivan highlighted that the with the region seeing more data sovereignty regulations coming in, that topic is top of mind.

He explained that data sovereignty is becoming a bigger topic both through the AI trends and that challenge of the shadow AI increasing the security threat vector that clients need to manage. Customers want to optimize the opportunity of AI, but they also need to guard against that shadow AI risk. And then being compliant with all of the local regulations, particularly if they've got big government clients.

“We deal with enterprises that are typically around 1,000 employees to 50,000 employees. So, we're not going to go and sort of pitch to large enterprise, but really focus on quite material multinationals that are spread far and wide. And that telco independent business model means that wherever they want to go in the world, we're able to work with them,” he said.

At the same time, Sullivan stated that as these companies want to capture the opportunity of AI particularly, there's so many initiatives going on in that space.

“And as I say, that's creating traffic pattern changes that mean the network needs to be dimensioned and capable and secure to be able to handle that change. So, yes, I think there's some of the reasons why there is a big opportunity for Coevolve,” he concluded.