AT&T is buying the Vyatta assets of Brocade Communications, including the Vyatta vRouter. And AT&T also intends to hire certain Brocade employees associated with that business who are mostly located in California and the United Kingdom. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in early summer, prior to the closing of Broadcom’s purchase of Brocade.

SDxCentral heard rumors of AT&T’s interest in Vyatta in early May. Analysts speculated that if a service provider bought the vRouter technology it could use it within its own network, and it also could resell it to its enterprise customers. That would slam router vendors such as Cisco and Juniper on two fronts: they would lose the service provider’s business, and they would be competing against the service provider for enterprise business.

In today’s announcement, AT&T said the Vyatta platform will help it drive its network transformation toward virtualization. The company is marching toward a goal to control 75 percent of its network with software by 2020.

AT&T is also becoming very interested in white box hardware. In today’s announcement, it said the Vyatta assets would advance its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) agenda. The carrier is working with VeloCloud to develop its own in-house SD-WAN capabilities.

Also, at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) in April, AT&T executives talked about a live field trial that the company conducted with multiple suppliers where it tested an open source, white box switch carrying customer traffic.

In addition, AT&T belongs to the telco group within the Open Compute Project (OCP), which is working on a universal CPE (uCPE).

With the Vyatta assets AT&T said it gets the Vyatta network operating system, including its virtual network functions (VNFs), software under development as part of its unreleased roadmap, existing software licenses, and related patents and patent applications.

At one point in time, Vyatta's software routing stack was licensed from the third-party company IPInfusion. It’s unclear whether that is still the case. But it raises the question: Why would AT&T buy the Vyatta assets if the value is in the routing stack and the routing stack might actually be licensed from IPInfusion? It could be that the licensing terms are favorable, so AT&T is locking that down. Also, AT&T gets the Vyatta team with their virtual routing expertise.

Just yesterday, Brocade announced that Pulse Secure is purchasing its virtual application delivery controller (vADC) assets for an undisclosed amount.

Brocade still owns a few software assets that it needs to unload, including its software-defined networking (SDN) controller.