Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ Aruba division scored a deal to provide Canadian telecommunications provider Videotron with its SD-branch platform. The move furthers what has been a busy few months for HPE’s broader SD-WAN efforts.

The new agreement will see Videotron add Aruba’s SD-branch platform and its 9000 Series Gateways to support the operator’s high-speed internet service. The gateways are optimized to support SD-WAN MPLS, internet, and cellular connectivity.

The new products will integrate with Videotron’s existing Aruba Central cloud platform deployment. The SD-branch service will also run alongside Videotron’s existing Aruba wireless service that uses a 4G LTE connection to supply a wireless backup to the system’s wired service.

Videotron already offers VMware’ VeloCloud SD-WAN platform, which it launched last year. The SD-branch extension adds a software-defined option for branch locations at the edge of an organization’s network.

Quebec-based Videotron has more than 1.6 million total customers across its telecom, cable television, video on demand, and internet service offerings. It is the province’s largest wireless operator based on customer count, and the country’s No. 5 largest wireless operator. It mostly serves customers in Quebec and some French-speaking areas of New Brunswick and Ontario.

The carrier late last year signed a deal with Samsung for the vendor to provide it with 4G LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and 5G radio access networks. The operator plans to launch those services by the end of the year.

HPE acquired Aruba for $3 billion in 2015. The division is best known for its WiFi and LAN switching technologies, and entered the contentious WAN market in 2018. Aruba updated its SD-branch hardware earlier this year with built-in cellular capabilities, improved security features, and a new SD-WAN orchestrator.

Gartner rated Aruba as a “niche” player in a WAN edge infrastructure report it released late last year. It was touted for having a “solid, scalable orchestration platform that simplifies deployment, management, and service assurance of wireless, wired, and SD-WAN environments.”

HPE last month announced plans to acquire Silver Peak for $925 million in a move to bolster its broader SD-WAN efforts. Analysts noted that Silver Peak’s deeper SD-WAN products should boost Aruba’s ability to compete against market rivals like Cisco and VMware.

“There is a technology hole that they have with SD-WAN. … At the same time, when I look at where Aruba competes with their wireless LAN and switching, it’s against Cisco,” Shin Umeda, VP at Dell’Oro Group, said to SDxCentral. He added that the only place where Aruba couldn’t compete with Cisco was branch routing, something that the Silver Peak acquisition directly addresses.

Umeda added that while Aruba may be late to the SD-WAN game, the company is now in a position to address enterprise networking demands from switching and wireless LAN, to the WAN. “There aren’t many companies that have that capability,” he said.