Cisco launched its integrated SD-WAN platform running on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Cloud WAN platform, with British Telecom (BT) set to announce during the upcoming Cisco Live event that it plans to use the platform.

Jean-Luc Valente, VP of product management for enterprise routing and SD-WAN at Cisco, announced the launch in a blog post. Valente stated the joint offering provides a “seamless and unified connectivity experience for organizations to interconnect their sites and use as an on-ramp to AWS Cloud workloads and services.”

The offering uses Cisco’s SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp to automate the management of connectivity across AWS’s global backbone between an enterprise site and AWS Cloud workloads. This can be managed using a single Cisco SD-WAN vManage dashboard to orchestrate the SD-WAN overlay and AWS Cloud WAN underlay.

Valente noted this allows for performance optimization across a multi-region network, taps automation and translation of user intent to reduce SD-WAN workflow complexity, supports 99.99% uptime backed by AWS’s service level agreement (SLA), and has built-in Cisco security to provide end-to-end encryption and network segmentation policies for user and application traffic.

BT plans to market the platform to its enterprise customer base. This comes on the heels of the telecom operator deepening a long-standing relationship with Fortinet to launch a new managed enterprise service that ties together SD-WAN, SD-branch and security services.

The Cisco product launch comes nearly a year after it initially announced plans to integrate with AWS’s Cloud WAN platform. That platform is AWS’s move to streamline the process of connecting on-premises data centers and branch offices to the cloud provider’s global backbone network, with AWS providing a migration path from its Transit Connect Gateway and Direct Connect products.

“Now that AWS Cloud WAN is generally available, customers can use it to interoperate with their existing AWS Transit Gateway-based network or migrate entirely to AWS Cloud WAN to greatly simply the process of building and managing a WAN,” Peter McKiernan, senior product marketing manager of networking at AWS told SDxCentral at that time.

Vipul Shah, senior manager of product management for Cisco SD-WAN, previously explained to SDxCentral that enterprises continue to be challenged by the complexity and speed of SD-WAN cloud networking. This impacts their ability to optimize their SD-WAN cloud and branch networks.

“These customers need to get to outcomes quickly and are looking for solutions that can be deployed with radically lower learning curves and with automation that handles network service configuration for them,” Shah said. “Cisco SD-WAN integrations with AWS Cloud WAN address these challenges with a simple on-demand global network and end-to-end automation.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify that AWS Transit Connect and Direct Connect products are still available.