Integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS has both benefits and challenges

Today, communications come in many forms, including voice, video conferencing, meeting services, messaging, streaming, etc. Companies like Avaya, Cisco, and Vonage have combined these capabilities and sold them as unified communications, or UC.

As enterprises change their consumption patterns and buy more communications as a service, they can now buy UC as a service, also known as UCaaS.

When UCaaS connects branch offices to headquarters, the service runs over a WAN connection. In addition, enterprises are deploying software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) to improve WAN management and cloud connectivity. So it would seem that UCaaS (which also runs over that internet connection) would work well with SD-WAN.

While integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS can provide certain benefits to enterprises, it can come with some challenges and hidden drawbacks. Let’s look at the pros and cons of integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS.

How SD-WAN and UCaaS work together

There are advantages to combining SD-WAN and UCaaS. Here are three clear advantages:

(1) Get better packet performance. Viewing SD-WAN and UCaaS traffic simultaneously can help improve video quality through better quality of service, while also reducing packet loss or packet duplication. The potential benefits of more efficient bandwidth and the ability to identify priority traffic, while also addressing packet loss issues, can help improve overall communications.

(2) Get more comprehensive visibility. SD-WAN combined with UCaaS provides a better understanding of the overall environment. The combination of the two technologies can make it easier to spot potential problems, especially if the two services have a shared console.

(3) Align pricing levers. If SD-WAN and UCaaS are handled as a single transaction or as part of an overall service agreement, the enterprise may gain purchasing and support advantages from a single vendor.

Why SD-WAN and UCaaS Might Not Be a Good Match

Will enterprises always gain efficiencies when combining SD-WAN and UCaaS? Probably not always. There are also some hidden drawbacks that enterprises should consider, including:

(1) It’s not easy to integrate disparate services. UCaaS is designed to cover the entire enterprise, not just the branch office. If a branch-office connectivity product is integrated with an enterprise-wide communications product, the enterprise may create a suboptimal pairing.

Even if an enterprise uses Cisco as its SD-WAN vendor and UC provider, the enterprise either manages the two products as separate entities in the Cisco environment, or this single-vendor dependency may come from different company acquisitions. The only real synergy may come from purchase orders, but the procurement cycles for these products may not be synchronized because different enterprises drive their own purchasing decisions.

(2) Be aware of future limitations. SD-WAN deployments should be invisible to applications and edge devices behind the SD-WAN device. The whole idea behind SD-WAN is to abstract control of connectivity from everything running on it.

If UCaaS traffic is optimized for specific SD-WAN deployments, including managed SD-WAN, this leads to a larger question. Namely, will the SD-WAN-UCaaS combination constrain enterprise decisions going forward, especially if public cloud migration of these services is a long-term strategy?

Ultimately, every organization's decision will be different when considering integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS. However, before deciding, organizations should consider both the positive and negative outcomes.