California Telecom SD-WAN Platform vs. Cradlepoint NetCloud Engine

CalTel SD-WAN platform is well suited for organization that are looking for scalability but in a cost-effective way. CalTel SD-WAN platform is also suited for organization who do not want to use their internal resource managing this system

The platform and product selection as a whole covers a lot of range. The pricing is low enough and the levels granular enough that even customers that only need the use of a few features of the product can buy into the ecosystem with reasonable investment and grow with confidence without having paid too much. One thing that this enterprise company gets is this: Many small companies need enterprise-class features but don't have the user count to justify purchasing enterprise-class solutions. It is not that they don't need advanced features, it's just that enterprise vendors assume that small companies only have basic needs. It is not true, but you can't buy a solution that is only sold in hundreds of seats if you have 25 users in your company. Cradlepoint NetCloud does a good job of getting this right. You can buy a single seat or hundreds of seats, and the price is truly commensurate with your seat count. Everyone gets the enterprise features, you only pay for the seats you need.

Incentivized

• Inovative infratructure for scalability and realiability.
• More cost-effective from service to support
• Proactive monitoring
• Knowledgeable engineers
• Seemless implementation

• Remote router management
• Grouping and templating configurations
• Notifications and showing cellular health

Incentivized

• Jim G. works well with executive staff in discovering ways to meet requirement, implement a more scalable technology, while still being cost-effective. Jim will need to replicate himself in order to be able to have others to do this type of work instead.

• Group management of devices could be easier.
• Customized reporting would be nice.
• The task scheduler is not very robust (only one task is available for scheduling).

Incentivized

Device management is nearly the same as if you logged in locally, giving a familiar feel to the interface. Device group management can be cumbersome when pushing firmware updates.

Incentivized

Every time I have engaged support, it has been a satisfying experience. Because they cover such a wide range of applications, I do have to spend more time explaining our intended results and rationale than I would have to do with a more focused vendor, but it's a minor tradeoff for the value of saved time in every other aspect of the solution.

Incentivized

It is much easier to group your devices within NetCloud prior to deployment. We ran into issues of lost/changed settings when grouping devices that had already been deployed

Incentivized

Cal-Tel is more cost effective, reliable, and have a more proactive management.

The cost of equipment, lines, and services was over 1,000 times the five year cost of Cradlepoint (formerly Pertino) when looking for a complete WAN replacement. Using small Linux devices (Intel NUCs) instead of expensive networking hardware provided equal service levels when we needed passthrough site-based access, rather than buying specific hardware from a vendor (including even Cradlepoint, though the integration is great and I do recommend their devices - especially for their cellular data redundancy features)

Incentivized

• Moving from Windstream system to CalTel cut gave us a monthly savings of $371K /yr for our phone and internet expenses.
• It also allowed us to be more proactive when a circuit has trouble and allowed us to have redundancy.
• Also allowed us to easily migrate our servers to a Data-Center and manage the traffic.

• It has freed me up to do more productive things instead of troubleshooting the VPN.
• It has made my employees happier because they have less frustrations working from home or on the road.

Incentivized