The dream of SD-WAN is pretty simple: make networking faster, better, cheaper, and more secure. The problem is proprietary technologies simply can't scale to meet these aspirations, says Sorell Slaymaker, principal consulting analyst at TechVision Research.

Speaking during a recent webinar, Slaymaker joined flexiWAN Founder and CEO Amir Zmora, whose company is the first to develop and launch an open source SD-WAN platform, in discussing the state of the SD-WAN market. They specifically discussed how an open source approach can address the technology's most pressing challenges.

According to Slaymaker, many of the problems facing the SD-WAN market are born out of the lack of any kind of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)-style industry standard.

"The reality, and this is a hard reality, is for the first time in all the years that I've been working on networking, there's no IETF protocol standard," he said of SD-WAN.

While industry forces like MEF are attempting to change that, short of such a standard, Slaymaker said if an open source platform can become the de facto standard that might be just as good. In fact, "under the covers," a lot of the SD-WAN software stack is already open source with some proprietary code to tie it all together, Slaymaker said.

"One reason that there are 60-plus SD-WAN vendors is each of these SD-WAN vendors is not going out and writing their code from scratch. What they're doing is they're going out and taking all these open source components, bundling them together, adding their additional stuff, and selling it as a proprietary solution," he said, adding that there is an opportunity to break the cycle and develop an entirely open SD-WAN framework.

But while most of the SD-WAN stack already exists in the open source world, Zmora said, "there is still a lot of work that you need to do on your own, mainly on the management side in order to really realize, and that's actually what we're trying to do."

flexiWAN became the first open source SD-WAN platform to reach the market early this January.

“This release is a major milestone for flexiWAN and our community as it is the world’s first production-ready open and community-driven SD-WAN solution,” Zmora said at the time. “Our innovation and openness doesn’t stop at the technical level.

But even before reaching general availability, the company won over Telefónica, which late last year announced a partnership with flexiWAN to develop a proof-of-concept SD-WAN service designed to run on white-box consumer premises equipment (CPE).

Despite these challenges, both Zmora and Slaymaker argue that a fully open source platform can fix one of SD-WAN's most glaring deficiencies: the lack of interoperability.

Enterprise networks aren't homogenous, explained Slaymaker. Campuses, branch or home offices, remote workers, and cloud resources are all networked differently, and "we end up with a network that's really a bunch of different networks within the enterprise."

Zmora likened the current state of the SD-WAN market to feature phones of the past that might be able to communicate over something like WhatsApp but only with other phones of the same make, and if you wanted to use a different messaging service you had to buy a different phone.

This lack of interoperability also means most SD-WAN platforms are really point solutions, Slaymaker said. "I can use them to connect my retail stores to my data center, but I can't really use them cost effectively everywhere that I want to because my partners are using a different solution."

An open source SD-WAN platform wouldn't have this problem because the means for communication from any given point would be a known variable.

The second problem an open source SD-WAN platform can fix is vendor lock-in, Zmora explained. Vendors want to bring customers into their walled gardens, he said. "The way to do that is to actually bundle into one big software stack as many capabilities and features as possible."

While no doubt inconvenient for enterprises, this is a big challenge for service providers.

"For the service provider, differentiation is key to survival and being able to sell products," Zmora said. "When we speak to them, they have a hard time with many of the SD-WAN solutions because they cannot really offer much more on top."

An open source SD-WAN platform would offer service providers with something of a blank slate on which to build their managed services. And such a platform, should it catch on, wouldn't bring about the demise of the SD-WAN vendor either. Zmora argued that making SD-WAN open source would actually make the market more competitive by forcing vendors to compete on their strengths.

"The vendors out there can continue to add additional features and functionality to differentiate their solutions," Slaymaker explained. "But if we don't have that common base we're back to that traditional IP networking and SD-WAN just being a point solution."