Pureport, an SDN startup that provides private connections to public clouds, partnered with network service provider PacketFabric, giving enterprises access Pureport’s multicloud Fabric platform in more than 150 data centers worldwide.

Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Pureport launched in 2018 and started shipping its platform in March. The SDN-based platform provides private access from on-premises networks via an IPsec VPN to the major public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and, as of next week, Oracle Cloud — using the native private connectivity offerings of these cloud service providers.

And with today’s announcement, it also offers direct, multicloud connections from PacketFabric’s more than 150 points of presence (PoPs) in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions. PacketFabric is “the first of what we expect to be several data center and service provider partners,” said Gary McAuliffe, vice president of strategic partnerships at Pureport.

The partnership uses PacketFabric’s layer 2 network, which connects data centers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific via its programmable SDN platform. And then Pureport’s SDN technologies add a layer 3 distributed multicloud routing engine that connects a company’s sites, data centers, and public clouds in a mesh fabric.

“The distributed multicloud router is our secret sauce, allowing us to not only connect at layer 3 to all the cloud providers but also allowing seamless multiple cloud connections,” McAuliffe said.

It doesn’t require any additional hardware or virtual appliances — the multicloud router is built into the platform. And it’s available as an on-demand service, which helps customers manage costs by scaling connectivity to suit their business needs.

“This model is one that we would like to extend with other carriers and service providers,” said Doug Mittendorf, chief technology officer at Pureport. “Other players are focused on building out lots of PoPS, and we’re taking the the partnership approach to reach additional cloud regions in the world. This is one of our strategies going forward to reach our customers where they already have their equipment.”

It’s also a delicate balancing act because a lot of these colocation and service providers that would make good Pureport partners are also essentially Pureport competitors. Like Equinix, for example: Equinix offers its own SDN-based interconnection platform called Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric and it offers direct connections to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. And Pureport is an Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric partner.

What’s unique about Pureport is its layer 3 focus, and that makes it complementary to some of these other platforms like Equinix, Mittendorf said.

“Another differentiator is that a lot of the carriers and data centers, even the Megaports of the world are focused on the cloud on ramp — private connections for a data center to the cloud,” Mittendorf said. “We have a lot of focus on the site connectivity as well through the VPN. So when you bring that in it can become more of a holistic, private network connecting all of your clouds.”

But, he admits, “we do feel like our solution crosses many of the swim lanes.”

“We sit between the lanes of a cloud on ramp and an SD-WAN vendor,” McAuliffe added.

Pureport won’t say how many customers use its platform. But earlier this summer the company announced that MediPortal, a healthcare software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, is using its multicloud Fabric platform to orchestrate private connectivity between MediPortal’s customers’ medical sites, patients, and payors.