Fortinet this week became the latest SD-WAN vendor to add support for the Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) platform.

The news comes a month after Megaport officially launched MVE in collaboration with Cisco’s Viptela SD-WAN. MVE is a network-as-a-service platform that promises to simplify branch-to-cloud connectivity on SD-WAN platforms.

The service is composed of two parts: an edge compute offering capable of running virtual network functions (VNFs), like virtual routers or SD-WAN controllers at the edge, and a middle-mile transport service, which can be used as an alternative to costly MPLS circuits or the open internet.

By limiting the amount of time SD-WAN traffic traverses the open internet, Megaport and its partners claim it can significantly improve network reliability. Megaport offers connectivity to more than 360 service providers, 700 data centers, and 200 cloud interconnect point locations. And tight integrations with Cisco, and now Fortinet, enable the SD-WAN vendors’ customers to spin up connections over Megaport’s network in a matter of minutes right from their SD-WAN console.

Middle-mile mania

Middle-mile connectivity is all the rage in the SD-WAN space right now. This makes sense as employees start returning to work and enterprise IT teams shift their focus back to branch connectivity, cutting costs associated with MPLS connectivity, said Gartner VP Neil MacDonald, in a recent interview with SDxCentral.

And according to Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, middle-mile providers address a challenge that often can't be solved for by SD-WAN alone.

“Most SD-WAN solutions address last-mile network optimization where customers can use a mix of access technologies such as cable and internet,” he said. “This solves part of the end-to-end network problem, but exposes a bigger issue, and that's middle-mile connectivity, which can vary greatly depending on [the] connection.”

This is where private middle-mile providers like Megaport come in. Private networks can be up to 10 times faster than the internet, Kerravala said. He added that while middle-mile connectivity usually isn’t an issue up to a few hundred miles, for longer stretches, internet connectivity can become highly unpredictable. “The internet is a best-effort system,” he added.

“Middle-mile partnerships bring a level of predictability and performance assurance to the SD-WAN that one would have had with private services like MPLS,” Kerravala said. “Now customers can have the cost benefits of SD-WAN combined with the performance of private networks.”

Megaport is far from the only company offering middle-mile connectivity to the SD-WAN vendors.

Earlier this spring, Versa Networks began offering WAN-on-demand connectivity through a collaboration with Apcela, which promised to improve the performance of latency-sensitive applications – particularly in environments where MPLS links aren’t practical.

Meanwhile, Cisco unveiled a similar partnership that uses Google Cloud’s private backbone for middle-mile connectivity.

Domain name service and content delivery network operator Cloudflare dipped its toes into the transport business, too. The company's Magic Transit offering integrates with existing SD-WAN appliances and allows users to route traffic over the company’s private backbone. Cloudflare also announced tightened integrations with Aruba and VMware appliances to automate the provisioning of Magic Transit.