SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 7th, 2016 – Silver Peak, the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions, today announced Veterans United Home Loans headquartered in Columbia, Mo, a national VA Home Loan lender, has successfully deployed the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution to fortify its current Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) Ethernet network across its 30+ locations. With Silver Peak, Veterans United can now fully leverage existing underutilized broadband connectivity to prevent brownouts and mitigate lack of service issues.
Like many high-growth geographically distributed enterprises, Veterans United Home Loans relies on the consistency of network performance and ability to quickly scale to maintain a successful business model. After several bouts with brownouts due to lapses in VPLS performance, Veterans United evaluated a range of SD-WAN solutions that would meet their zero brownout tolerance needs and offer the performance, security and resiliency required to deliver the agility their high-touch business model demands. Armed with their own WAN emulator, the Veteran’s United IT team was able to simulate production network scenarios, including brownouts and network interruptions to fully test and validate SD-WAN solutions.
Based on the internal test results of the Silver Peak EdgeConnect solution, Veterans United quickly landed on an SD-WAN vendor that checked all of the boxes on its requirements list, including the ability to fully utilize existing broadband connectivity and classify network traffic in alignment with business intent. By augmenting the current VPLS network with EdgeConnect, Veterans United realized the full potential of its broadband connectivity and is experiencing an unparalleled level of network performance and consistency that enables loan officers to service customers efficiently and effectively across all locations.
“Silver Peak’s EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution has afforded us the flexibility we need to segment applications and prioritize performance across our network in alignment with business intent,” said Gary Lee, Chief Technology Officer of Veterans United. “We have a limited threshold for error when it comes to the ability to service our borrowers, network performance and resiliency has proven to be the foundation of ensuring we are effective and successful.”
Veterans United Home Loan’s decision to deploy Silver Peak was not only rooted in the performance of the company’s flagship SD-WAN solution, but the ability to simply and flexibly apply incremental performance by deploying Unity Boost WAN optimization. Unity Boost gives Veterans United the unique ability to apply even higher performance standards to business critical applications like voice, thereby ensuring a predictable and consistent user experience delivered on a single device, when and where the customer needs it.
“Veterans United Home Loans is the perfect example of a geographically distributed enterprise that simply needed a hybrid approach to building a better WAN,” added Silver Peak SVP and CMO, John Vincenzo. “Veterans United is not alone as most of our customers are quickly coming to the realization that network performance, consistency and reliability are critical to achieving greater business agility while virtually eliminating the business impact and costs associated with network interruptions and outages.”
Unlike other SD-WAN solutions that focus simply on enabling enterprises to leverage Internet connectivity, Silver Peak delivers a level of broadband quality of service that increases the reliability and security customers expect from traditional private line connections. With EdgeConnect as the foundation for an SD-WAN, distributed enterprises can improve the resiliency of their WAN, dynamically balance traffic across multiple paths and increase application performance over any source of connectivity.
About Veterans United Home Loans
Based in Columbia, Mo., the national lender financed more than $7.3 billion in loans in 2015. Its mission is to help Veterans and service members take advantage of the home loan benefits earned by their service. In 2016, Veterans United was named No. 30 on the Top 100 Best Companies to Work For by Great Place to Work and Fortune. The company’s employee-driven charitable arm, Veterans United Foundation, is committed to enhancing the lives of Veterans and military families nationwide by focusing on supporting military families and nonprofit organizations that strengthen local communities. Veterans United Home Loans and its employees have given more than $20 million to the Foundation since its founding in November 2011. Learn more at EnhanceLives.com.