Verizon opened up more control of its managed SD-WAN service offerings with a new co-management tier announced today.

The new tier gives enterprise customers the ability to change SD-WAN policies, such as those for application routing and quality of service, through the Verizon Enterprise Center (VEC) self-service, policy management portal or using Verizon's API platform.

Verizon's Co Management SD-WAN option joins the company's existing full management and Monitor and Notify service tiers.

“By adding Co Management to our managed services portfolio, we are giving enterprise customers the ability to define and implement their SD-WAN policies across their location based on a rules-based engine, themselves,” said Vickie Lonker, VP of product management at Verizon, in a statement.

Lonker explained that the Co Management tier was developed in answer to customer feedback, an understanding of industry trends, and the desire to meet its customer's business needs.

According to Verizon, customers will be able to define intents based on user applications, sites, and their WAN links. Once these have been defined, different policies can be enforced based on business needs. However, any policies that can't be addressed using these customer portals will need to be managed by Verizon directly.

By leveraging intent-based interfaces, Verizon claims it is removing roadblocks to managing multivendor platforms and deployments, thus allowing customers to implement features for a variety of vendor services with a single click.

“Verizon is on to something here. Enterprise IT departments want control over SD-WAN policies but they need help with the rest of the platform,” said Brian Washburn, practice leader of network transformation & cloud at Ovum. “Co Management lets customers control network configuration while Verizon oversight provides a safety net.”