Cisco this week continued to build out its service provider network announcing that Minnesota-based ConvergeOne had added Cisco's Viptela service to its SD-WAN lineup.

ConvergeOne's Viptela-based offering, dubbed Secure SD-WAN, is built on the company's OnGuard service delivery platform. The new service also bundles threat detection and advisory services from vendor Alert Logic.

The service provider claims the offering is ideally suited for enterprises struggling with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) application performance thanks to Viptela's application-based routing and WAN acceleration.

A long-time Cisco partner, Secure SD-WAN joins Cisco's branch-oriented Meraki SD-branch offering in ConvergeOne's managed services portfolio. ConvergeOne also offers 128 Technologies' SD-WAN platform.

The service provider is targeting the Viptela-based offering at larger enterprises with complex network routing and security requirements. ConvergeOne is aiming its existing Meraki offering at smaller, price-sensitive clients.

The announcement marks Cisco's second service provider announcement in the past month. TPx Communications added Cisco Meraki's SD-WAN service to its managed services with the launch of MSx Networks.

"As the market shifts to an as-a-service model, we are seeing many of our traditional resell partners moving into SD-WAN managed services to augment their integration and professional services," said Jason Gallo, senior director of enterprise networking at Cisco, in an email to SDxCentral. He explained that this shift has created an opportunity for the company's service provider partners — like ConvergeOne — to capitalize on this growing demand in the SD-WAN space.

While these service provider wins will no doubt bolster Cisco's customer count, which Cisco claims had surpassed 20,000 last fall, the vendor has faced criticism by industry analysts at Gartner in the latest WAN Edge Infrastructure report.

The report saw Gartner downgrade Cisco from a "leader" to a "challenger" as a result of system lock-in, a complex licensing structure, and challenges with scalability.

“Cisco has broad, separate, and overlapping SD-WAN offerings that don’t share a common management platform, hardware platform, or sales teams,” the report reads.

Cisco has since rebuffed these critiques arguing that the company's massive customer base and service provider network speaks for itself.

Meanwhile, competing research firms IDC and IHS Markit have consistently ranked Cisco in the top two slots alongside VMware's competing VeloCloud SD-WAN platform.

GTT announced that it had secured a four-year contract to supply Captivate, a digital signage and display technology provider, with its managed SD-WAN service. GTT will provide SD-WAN service to 1,700 locations across North America, which include hotel lobbies and elevators, where Captivate delivers real-time video content and advertising, to digital signage.

"The expansion of real-time, on-demand content updates requires 100% video broadcast uptime," explained Captivate VP of Operations Del McPhetridge, in a statement.

Due to the nature of Captivate's installations, GTT will utilize a combination of 3G and 4G LTE-enabled appliances, which the service provider claims will offer greater reliability and performance.

The contract win comes after a difficult couple of quarters for the service provider. Late last year GTT announced it had hired Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs to help the company offload its infrastructure division. The announcement briefly sent the company's stock surging, but the company still faces many roadblocks, including $3.2 billion of long term debt.

Enea announced a partnership with Ubiqube to develop a service automation platform for virtual network functions (VNF), including those for SD-WAN and security.

The companies aim to eliminate service deployment and lifecycle management challenges commonly associated with universal CPE (uCPE) deployments with the ultimate goal of simplifying and reducing operational costs. To achieve this Enea plans to pair its NFV Access virtualization platform with UBiqube's MS Activator automation platform.

According to UBiqube CEO Nabil Souli in an earlier interview SDxCentral, MS Activator was developed to “help drive easy and affordable integration and to drive greater automation.”