Xalient Wins Megabuyte50 Best Performing Company 2022

We are excited to announce that Xalient has won the Megabuyte50 Award for the Best Performing Company – Telecoms Services category !

Megabuyte is the leading source of independent data and insights on UK technology and tech-enabled businesses, and the Megabuyte50 awards identify the UK’s 50 best performing, privately-owned technology companies. Committing to delivering excellence is one of our core values, and to be recognised as a top performer in our industry is testament to the amazing team here at Xalient.

L-R Ian Spence from Megabuyte, Sherry Vaswani and Mark Cooke, Group Chief Operating Officers at Xalient.

Sherry Vaswani, CEO at Xalient, said:

“Naturally we’re thrilled to win this prestigious award. We’re proud that our expertise spans a range of digital transformation services and technologies – from telecoms through to software-defined networking and cybersecurity solutions. This recognition evidences our commitment to delivering excellence in what we do and challenges we’ve helped our clients overcome.

The full list of Megabuyte50 winning companies can be found here.

 

Happy International Mentoring Day!

International Mentoring Day is recognised on January 17th in honour of Muhammad Ali’s birthday and his everlasting impact as a worldwide mentor.

At Xalient, we believe that mentoring is a critical component of a successful Diversity, Equity & Inclusion program and we are proud to provide a culture where knowledge is continually shared in a collaborative nature.

Regardless of tenure or experience level, we don’t always know the answers on our own, which is why our mentorship program really does make a positive difference when connecting various experience levels throughout the company.

Xalient’s Strategic People Advisor, Annie Davies adds:

“Our Mentoring programme has been an integral part of the Development Plans and Career Roadmaps for Team Members for some years, yielding huge benefits for individuals and the Company. The fact that 80% of senior and management appointments in the Company have been from within the business in the past two years, suggests it is working. However, there is more we can do, and this is about to be enhanced and extended in 2023, through our Culture & Inclusion Programme, whereby Mentoring will be central to the support, well-being and career progression, through tailored, personal plans.”

Global network services provider Xalient, today announced that it has been awarded the Aruba Silver Peak EMEA Partner of the Year FY21 award, presented at the FY21 Aruba EMEA Channel Partner Awards Ceremony 

The Awards, hosted virtually by  Silver Peak (acquired by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, in 2020), recognise partners for excellence in sales and delivery of the Aruba EdgeConnect Platform across 2021. 

Xalient has been part of the Silver Peak Partner Program since 2011 and, in that time, has heavily invested in Silver Peak sales and technical certifications. In March 2020, Xalient was awarded Certified Deployment Partner Accreditation – one of just nine organisations worldwide to have successfully obtained the certification– which recognises partners who have been chosen and trained to perform all facets of SD-WAN installation and deployment of Silver Peak products. Xalient is also recognised as a Silver Peak Platinum partner as a result of the significant Silver Peak technical certifications and sales it has achieved.

On receiving the Silver Peak EMEA Partner of the Year FY21 award, Xalient’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Sherry Vaswani said:  

We’re delighted to have been recognised as EMEA Silver Peak Partner of the Year 2021 as it evidences the great work we’ve done with Silver Peak and our customers over the course of the year and the continued investment we make in our partnership.

Xalient exists to help connect users and devices to applications and data and we’re proud to help our customers accelerate their digital transformation through best-of-breed technologies like the Aruba EdgeConnect platform

“Thanks to our experience in global SD-WAN deployments, we’re ensuring that customers can implement SD-WAN technology in a quick and flexible way and I look forward to furthering success with Silver Peak as we move into 2022. 

 

About Xalient 

Xalient is a disruptive network transformation company that specialises in software-defined networking, cloud security and unified communications, providing an innovative and independent alternative to traditional service providers. Our services are provided to large and global enterprises through a range of consulting and managed services, delivered from our offices in the UK and USA. For more information, visit: www.xalient.com.  

 

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.

Many in IT are familiar with Software-Defined – Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) or have significant investments in digital transformation.  Originally coined by Gartner, SASE: Secure Access Service Edge is the simplification and convergence of wide area networking and security. Delivering both as a cloud service directly to where the end user resides, rather than bringing that traffic back and centralising everything at a corporate data centre level. 

What is SASE?

The convergence of Network and Security groups that is driving this newfound SASE requirement.  SASE is driven by the need for mobility and flexibility for the end user. It must however, equally secure the legacy hub and spoke architectures of a traditional MPLS network.  Enabling the end user at the edge also improves application performance. The end user accesses the nearest point of presence for the application. This means that application latency is minimised vs a traditional, centralised, MPLS network where all of the traffic is brought back to a single point (many times across the globe) before traversing out to the internet.

With many enterprises embracing Cloud-First solutions (SaaS applications, Hyperscale infrastructure, Office365 etc.) there isn’t the need to have traffic route back to the Corporate datacenter over expensive, traditional MPLS networks.  Rather, enterprises are looking to enable those end users to directly access the internet at the edge. Reaching those applications and using their more expensive network circuits for internal self-managed applications.  This means that many clients can “right size” their MPLS environments. And in many cases replace expensive, dedicated circuits with much less expensive broadband or internet circuits. But how do you ensure that those edge locations and the end users are secure? 

The evolution of cloud-based security solutions has grown immensely over the last five years. 

Cloud-based next generation Firewalls (NGFW), or inexpensive but feature rich embedded NGFWs into the SD-WAN appliances can offer the same level of enterprise security as traditional premise-based FW technologies.  Identity Access, Zero Trust, Cloud Access Services Broker (CASB), and Software-Defined Perimeters are additional security solutions which can be layered onto those edge circuits/end user devices to ensure that enterprises maintain an aggressive security posture.  These technologies are cloud-based and can easily scale; important considerations for companies heavily vested in mergers & acquisitions or dynamic application requirements.

SASE is a new acronym to many folks.  As digital transformation and secure SD-WAN network transformations continue to take place the convergence of IT’s network and security teams will meld.  Expect SASE to become an industry-accepted acronym.

In the next two blog articles, I will look more at the intricacies of the network and then the elements around Security in greater detail.