BT has officially announced its software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) service based on Nuage Networks software.

The companies discussed the deal publicly last month at the SDN World Congress in The Hague, as SDxCentral reported. Today's announcement makes the deal official and sets a launch timeframe of early 2017.

In February, BT had announced another SD-WAN service called Connect Intelligence IWAN, based on Cisco’s IWAN and deployed on the Cisco routers that were already in the network.

The goal there was more in line with most SD-WAN services — that is, providing options for connectivity, so that an enterprise could choose to bypass MPLS connections or keep certain traffic off the Internet.

Nuage’s Virtualized Network Services (VNS) — the product that includes SD-WAN — has the loftier goal of connecting users to applications regardless of location. More importantly, VNS enforces network policy consistently, so even if an application is accessed from one of many clouds, the same security and authentication rules would apply.

The goal behind all of this is to make BT's network more flexible and to create services that enterprises can launch themselves. Self-service VPNs and the ability to adjust bandwidth up and down, are two of the examples BT cites.

BT says it has a whole roadmap of services to be announced soon. The service provider also says it's going to add utility pricing to SD-WAN where enterprises can pay-as-they-go for energy.