Nyansa Eyes Doubling Partner Base In Push For Enterprise Growth

Nyansa Inc. intends to double its partner ranks as its SaaS-based network analytics system gains traction in the enterprise and it seeks to make the most of its early advantage before larger competitors seize the market.

The Palo Alto, Calif., start-up has about 20 partners today, and David Callisch, the company's vice president of marketing, says it intends to build that number to about 40 in the next 18 to 20 months.

The channel growth comes as Nyansa's software finds traction among large enterprises, including current customers like Tesla and General Motors.

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Trent Cutler, a systems engineer at CompuNet, a Salt Lake City, Utah, solution provider that does business with Nyansa, said there's potential for CompuNet to see significant growth with Nyansa as more and more customers seek out network experts who don’t treat wireless technology like "black magic."

Nyansa's system is offered as a service and is vendor-agnostic, meaning it will work with infrastructure from Cisco, HPE Aruba and other OEMs.

Founded by MIT PhDs, Nyansa offers a network analytics as-a-service. Its software takes in every bit of wireless data, client information, application data and transaction across the network in order to figure out where things are going wrong.

With that information, the Nyansa system tells customers and partners – in plain English – how to fix those problems.

"It could be some serious growth," Cutler said. "I'm hoping to have this as something I include with wireless for any organization that has more than 75 access points, when wireless is used for production and universities. All universities should have this tool."

CompuNet has had success with Nyansa in university settings because wireless connectivity and reliability is of utmost importance to students. "Traditional networking guys are kind of curmudgeons about it," Cutler said. "They're saying, 'just plug in,' well, these kids are 18 years old. They don't know what you're talking about, and universities are losing students because Wi-Fi sucks in the dorms. When they stream Netflix, other students can't do their homework."

Nyansa allows CompuNet to tackle wireless problems and quickly show customers, like universities, the results. "You make a change, and it auto-marks it," Cutler said. "Here's where we made the change, and everything improves. It's magic. It makes me look good, it makes Nyansa look good, and the conversation becomes how can we solve more problems for you?"

Nyansa marketing vice president David Callisch said that while the company is looking to double the size of its partner base, it will be selective. The company today works with both Cisco and HPE Aruba, but may soon compete directly with those two networking powers as they bring their own network analytics platforms to market.

"It's not a mom-and-pop kind of partner we're looking for, it's someone who truly sells up and down the stack," Callisch said. "They have to have a broad understanding of the network, of the access network, not just from a Wi-Fi perspective. Wi-Fi tends to be the big pain point where a lot of customers don't have a lot of visibility into why things don't operate properly."

"The partner really needs to understand how the infrastructure management market is changing and the importance the customer is placing on the user experience on the network," Callisch added. "The extent to which users can be productive on the network is the extent to which the network is actually working properly."