Germany's T-Systems selected Juniper Networks’ SD-WAN platform to power its latest managed service offering, which it’s calling Smart SD-WAN.

According to Juniper, the offering will provide customers with a cost-effective alternative to MPLS that supports greater visibility and reliability across the network while enabling them to take advantage of more modern network topologies.

“A lot of enterprises have moved away from that traditional hub-and-spoke network topology between headquarters and branches with dedicated and expensive legacy MPLS to this much more agile SD-WAN infrastructure,” explained Sally Bament, VP of marketing at Juniper.

T-Systems’ Smart SD-WAN offering will make use of several Juniper Networks technologies including the Contrail Service Orchestration (CSO), SRX Series Security Gateways, the NFX Network Services universal CPE appliances, and vSRX virtual firewalls.

Bament said SD-WAN, in particular Juniper’s SD-WAN technology, is far better suited to addressing the diverse traffic patterns introduced by cloud-based workloads, which are increasingly becoming part of enterprise’s digital transformation strategies.

"Working with Juniper, we are able to provide our enterprise customers an end-to-end, demand-oriented infrastructure that supports their digitalization challenges and reduces complexity within the network,” said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of T-Systems, in a statement.

T-Systems claims the managed SD-WAN offering has already caught the eye of a yet-to-be-named European transportation brand, which plans to use the technology.

According to Bament, Juniper’s wide range of uCPE equipment was key for T-Sytems, which has many large-enterprise customers with diverse needs and varying degrees of complexity. “We give them the option to mix and match different equipment,” she said.

And while T-Systems is initially deploying Juniper’s SD-WAN platform, Bament says this is the first step toward a much broader services push in Europe.

“T-Systems is initially just rolling out our secure SD-WAN service, but through our universal CPE equipment, the NFX, we can actually allow them to, in the future if they wish, add other applications and services, and even third-party virtual network functions,” she said.