AT&T recently expanded its Enterprise work with Cisco, which includes increased security for SD-WAN services and could add the ability to integrate mobile 5G and fiber Broadband to more Enterprise customers. The move further tightens the work between the two companies and hints toward closer collaboration.

The latest expansion includes AT&T launching a self-service option for small- and mid-sized businesses that will allow them to simplify SD-WAN service deployment and management. This will be tied into the AT&T Business Wi-Fi with the Cisco Meraki product that the carrier initially unveiled last year.

That package includes AT&T’s Business Wi-Fi product that provides SD-WAN, wireless access points, switches, cellular access points, and teleworker appliances. AT&T also offers its Secure Remote Access with Cisco for zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and AT&T Secure Web Gateway with Cisco for secure Internet and cloud app access.

AT&T at that time also added Meraki to its extensive list of secure access service edge (SASE) options. That agreement has AT&T providing its customers with a managed SASE product that leverages Cisco’s Duo technology, which allows the platform to verify user identity and validate device health before granting access to the network.

The new agreement also has Cisco providing the ability to embed AT&T wireless connectivity into Cisco devices. This will support the use of the AT&T Control Center powered by Cisco for zero-touch provisioning of Cisco and AT&T customers.

Frost and Sullivan recently placed AT&T into a crowded leadership category as part of its latest ranking of managed SD-WAN providers. It noted the carrier provided customers with a “choice of market-leading SD-WAN vendors” such as Cisco, Aruba, VMware, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks, and “has the most SD-WAN sites deployed in North America.”

AT&T wants SD-WAN simplicity

While that depth shows well in industry rankings, William Eborall, assistant VP of product marketing management at AT&T, explained that AT&T’s deeper work with Cisco is based on the carrier’s push toward simplifying its Enterprise offerings.

“When you do a lot, it's difficult to do it very well and to do it as fast-paced as this industry and as fast as the software changes, as fast as the technologies are collapsing and integrating. I think that also creates a challenge to continue to scale across a broad set of vendor technologies and continue to innovate our own management ability,” Eborall said. “I think Cisco is a classic example of what we're trying to do. It's going to be 'do more with less,' and picking vendors that we can truly invest in, create new, unique things in the marketplace. To do that, it takes a lot of investment, not just financial, but resources and time to build out those unique capabilities.”

Eborall specifically cited Cisco’s work with its zero-touch provisioning that has allowed AT&T to create “automation to speed up and drive efficiency and in how we deliver these environments and deliver at scale, which I think is fairly unique.”

“Are they better than VMware? Are they better than Aruba or Palo Alto, or Fortinet? We have tested them all in our labs and with our customers in their environments,” Eborall said of Cisco’s work. “It’s a very strong technology for the Enterprise space. And where I see them converging, where I see them going with their security technologies and Duo Umbrella, they've got the full stack, and I think it's exciting to be able to work with them.”

Eborall also leaned toward Cisco as a strong option for AT&T in offering a single-vendor stack for a complete SD-WAN and security services edge (SSE) package to some Enterprise segments.

“I think in that single-vendor stack, there is a lot of power for helping customers with more of a modern security architecture in that small and medium space,” Eborall said. “We have that built into our managed play right now, and we've got that expertise already there to support it. I do see that as part of the evolution of what we will be working to deal with, just making it simpler, creating the right packages for customers to push the easy button, and not overcomplicating the combinations of when you have to do security on the device? How do you simplify doing secure Internet offload into the cloud and [Software-as-a-Service]? And how do you pay to support some of the remote users and do it in a more advanced security method than traditional Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) VPN?”

France’s Orange Business made a similar SASE consolidation move earlier this month with Palo Alto Networks.

Dell’Oro Group recently reported that the single-vendor SASE market, which includes SD-WAN and SSE functionality, grew 55% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2023 and overtook the multi-vendor portion of the market.

Mauricio Sanchez, Dell’Oro Group research director, noted the SASE market’s overall 30% revenue growth “is a testament to the strong commitment by enterprises and the value they bring to secure users’ access to cloud-based applications from anywhere.”

5G and SD-WAN?

AT&T also hinted that it’s working with Cisco to bring “secure on-demand connectivity for SD-WAN” to include mobile 5G and fiber Broadband connections. Those two connection methods are of utmost importance for the carrier.

Eberall noted that 5G connectivity does have a future in expanding AT&T’s SD-WAN products into the market, but that challenges remain.

First, he cited cost considerations with 5G-enabled devices currently costing significantly more than those embedded with legacy 4G LTE connectivity. “That will change over time and we'll get more and more value out of it, but it's a trigger point,” Eborall said.

He also pointed to consistent cellular connectivity as being difficult to achieve in some places. Eborall explained that one of AT&T’s larger clients went with a mobile-first solution to its more than 6,000 retail sites with inconsistent cellular connectivity results.

“We saw about 20% of the sites had issues,” Eborall said. “Some were even once it was deployed, it just wasn't consistent,” as opposed to fiber Broadband, which is “rock solid.”

“I would like to believe with network slicing and other cool technologies that we can create unique value plays with that. Maybe over time it could be more of a primary option,” Eborall said. “Fiber is limited, so you're not going to have the right speeds with fiber Broadband everywhere, so having the combination of both to pick and choose and create variations is where we see the most potential.”

A recent ABI Research report noted 5G connectivity was set to drive the next SD-WAN innovation cycle, pointing to “quality of experience demand, the rise of multi-access edge compute (MEC) and improvement in security created by network segmentation.”

However, the research firm also stated that the cycle could take several years to hit maturity.

“Given the immaturity of Enterprise 5G infrastructure, it is unlikely that this will be universally possible for three to five years,” the firm explained. “It is likely that when the infrastructure is in place, communication service providers will be in the driver’s seat to benefit from integrating 5G with SD-WAN.”