White-box hardware vendor Lanner and SD-WAN vendor nacXwan this week announced a partnership to develop SD-WAN appliances for distributed enterprises and telecom operators.

The agreement will see Lanner pair its universal CPE hardware with nacXwan’s SD-WAN software stack, which features a bevy of routing, security, application acceleration capabilities, as well as full multi-tenancy. Together the companies aim to provide service providers and system integrators with a product that’s easy to deploy and can help to reduce costs associated with SD-WAN equipment.

"The collaboration of Lanner's white-box uCPE and NacXwan SD-WAN as a Service solution addresses high capex and opex issues prevalent in many SD-WAN deployments," said Jackie Wang, Lanner sales director in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, in a statement.

nacXwan, which claims to have deployed its SD-WAN platform to more than 15,000 branch locations and 60,000 users, plans to use Lanner’s NCA-1020, NCA-1510, and NCA-4210 uCPE platforms for its latest generation of appliances. According to Lanner, these appliances have been optimized for use with nacXwan’s SD-WAN software and feature hardware-based cryptography acceleration, integrated WiFi and LTE connectivity, and high-core counts to support NFV.

Lanner’s uCPE hardware is central to several SD-WAN vendor and managed service provider strategies, including open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN, which became generally available earlier this year.

In the past year, the equipment vendor has also secured contracts with major service providers including Verizon and GTT to build SD-WAN appliances.

Last September Lanner joined the Open Compute Project with the goal of developing white-box appliances for 5G and edge applications.

Also this week Asavie announced a clientless connectivity service that aims to help enterprises more easily manage their mobile and IoT endpoints.

The service is designed to integrate and extend enterprises' existing SD-WAN, secure access service edge (SASE), or zero trust security deployments to IoT and mobile devices.

“We developed this solution to meet the demands of our service provider partners and end-user enterprises,” said Asavie CEO Ralph Shaw in a statement. “As a result of 5G technologies, they are managing accelerated growth in the number of mobile endpoints and mobile traffic.”