Adtran has thrown its hat in the ring and joined the SD-WAN circus.

The company, best known for its networking hardware and monitoring technology, launched its SD-WAN service this week.

Unlike industry giants Cisco and VMware, the Huntsville, Alabama-based networking firm isn't targeting large enterprises. Instead, Adtran has its sights set on bringing cloud-based networking to small- and medium-size businesses and distributed enterprises.

“ADTRAN’s software expertise and long history partnering with service providers to serve SMBs and distributed enterprises enables us to take networking and connectivity far beyond the limitations of legacy hardware-based solutions,” said Chris Thompson, director of software products and solutions at ADTRAN, in a statement.

However, the focus on this market segment is nothing new for the company.

"Service providers need a solution that can be quickly and easily installed in order to serve the large number of small businesses," a spokesperson for the company said in an email to SDxCentral. "These businesses need a solution that doesn’t require changes to the existing voice communications equipment or security solutions already in service."

The company's SD-WAN is built on a combination of in-house, open source, and third-party software, and it will be delivered to customers through the company's service provider network.

Adtran says its SD-WAN platform will provide customers with both in-and-out bound quality of service, as well as seamless connectivity and control of cloud applications and voice services.

The company's SD-WAN also benefits from the company's network monitoring technology to automatically detect and prioritize business-critical or performance-sensitive communications without the need to manually set up polices.

Atran claims that unlike many edge-based or next-generation firewall-based SD-WAN platforms, its approach supports active-active WAN links, inbound QoS, simple IP failover, and a cloud gateway for controlling cloud-based content.

Adtran's SD-WAN is expected to be generally available in December.

Adtran isn't the first networking vendor to target the small-to-medium size businesses.

SD-WAN start-up Bigleaf, which was founded in 2018 and last week secured $21 million in Series B funding, also sees the potential for growth in this market segment.

And according to Jon Seeber, general partner at Updata, this market segment has more than $2 billion in untapped potential.