SD-WAN vendor Cato Networks announced today that it has garnered certification as a RingCentral connectivity partner.
The certification was a seal of approval for Cato Networks' compatibility with unified communications-as-a-service offerings. Through RingCentral’s testing, Cato Networks was able to prove that its SD-WAN platform, which runs on its own private network, delivers a high-quality voice experience.
Cato Networks was able to guarantee high-quality voice calls despite some network packet loss. The RingCentral testing required calls to maintain MOS scores of 3.8 or higher, which is considered high quality.
"Cato continues to add important feature for cloud connectivity, providing a compelling enterprise offering to create global virtual WANs," said Scott Raynovich, the founder and chief analyst of Futuriom, in an email to FierceTelecom.
Cato Networks has more than 40 global points of presence (POPs), many of which are in the same data centers as RingCentral. Cato Networks can connect branch locations and mobile workforces into RingCentral data centers with a global, secure, and optimized cloud-native network.
"Many enterprises are deploying SD-WAN, as a leading technology to assure highest-levels of quality of service and availability,” said Curtis Peterson, RingCentral's senior vice president of cloud operations, in a prepared statement. “As part of our partner certification process, we tested Cato’s ability to deliver high-quality voice even under extremely poor network conditions. We found that Cato was able to accommodate more than 15% packet loss and still maintain a high-level of voice quality, which is a significant achievement in providing superior customer experience.”
While some SD-WAN vendors rely on the public internet, Cato Networks carries cloud communications traffic across its own network, which it said minimizes latency. Cato is also able to prevent congestion and last-mile packet loss, both of which impact voice quality, by using upstream and downstream quality of service, traffic prioritization and policy-based routing.
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Among the 50-plus SD-WAN vendors, Cato Networks is unique because its security functions are in the cloud and its POPs run on COTS hardware.