Orange and Cisco team up on SD-WAN
Orange Business Services announced it performed the first on-boarding of a Cisco SD-WAN virtual network function (VNF) on the Cisco Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS).
The platform includes a fully functional virtualized solution for network services, and is part of the Orange universal customer premise equipment (uCPE) offer. According to Orange, this approach strengthens its SD-WAN offering, and is part of an overall effort to transition to software-defined networks (SDN) and intent-based networking.
SD-WAN is an emerging network architecture, which enables enterprises to create, manage and optimize WAN connections. Research firm IDC projects global SD-WAN infrastructure and services revenues will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 69.6% and reach $8.05 billion in 2021. Orange said it is leveraging SD-WAN technology to build secure, hybrid connectivity for enterprises over any transport network, including MPLS, internet and satellite, with real-time centralized management of network functions, application policy setting and application visibility.
“This work strengthens our long-standing partnership with Cisco,” said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, vice president, Connectivity, Orange Business Services. “Together we are bringing innovations in SD-WAN and the wider network to our customers worldwide. These developments will help realize the promise of intent-based networking, which will use artificial intelligence to automatically orchestrate networks based on predicted user demand. This will help improve application performance, security and business continuity.”
The uCPE central orchestration will enable Orange to offer automated Cisco SD-WAN deployment, based on Viptela technology, in minutes on all enterprise, regardless of location. Cisco said it expects to reduce manual configuration by as much as 90% across the spectrum of mobile and enterprise networks through automation.
“SD-WAN provides the essential foundation for Service Providers to transform their network services,” said Sachin Gupta, senior vice president, product management for Cisco Enterprise Networking. “One of the truly global providers, we are excited Orange is accelerating the adoption of SD-WAN technology leveraging Cisco’s ENCS platform. Our partnership will accelerate customers’ transformation to cloud and digital while delivering new-age capability for simplified operations, application visibility and performance.”
The announcement follows Cisco recently unveiling its own container platform, which is intended to help customers deploy and manage applications across hybrid cloud environments. Built on Kubernetes, the Cisco Container Platform can help launch and manage virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal, both on-premises and in the cloud.
