With iconic properties from coast to coast, Equity Office Management is one of the nation’s largest owners of commercial buildings in the U.S. Owned by the Blackstone Group, Equity Office encompasses more than 45 million square feet of Class A office space.
All of Equity Office’s voice and data traffic run over an MPLS WAN, but when poor peak-time performance drew complaints from its employees, it switched to a Software Defined WAN that delivers more bandwidth at half the cost. There’s a tradeoff in that the company has to deal with more service providers than before, but the performance and savings make up for that, says Chavdar Momchev, Equity Office’s Director of Voice and Data Communications. “I expect a return on investment in about 10 months [with Talari],” he says. Complaints about response times have disappeared in offices that have the new connections.
The new WAN is fashioned by blending DSL, cable, fiber and Ethernet over copper into a single logical network. When one link fails, remaining links pick up the slack under the
direction of a Talari SD-WAN.
The new WAN costs about half the $400,000 per year he was spending on the MPLS service, Momchev says. When he factors in the capital cost of the Talari SD-WAN, he calculated a 10-month return on investment.
Momchev’s biggest fear was that it would degrade the quality of VoIP traffic running over the network, but there have been no problems even when one of the circuits feeding each office has failed. “We’ve been having outages, but there is no impact on end users,” he says.