Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) vendor Versa Networks partnered with CA Technologies to integrate Versa's Cloud IP platform with CA’s network analytics platform.

Versa’s Cloud IP platform was built to provide its customers with universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) that aims “to cover the edge — meaning branch and data center needs — completely,” said Dogu Narin, senior director of product management at Versa. “It gives you an open solution using our native software and/or third-party functions that come in the form of VMs [virtual machines] and can all run on the same appliance.”

Although Versa’s technology does have built-in routing and SD-WAN capabilities, it also provides users with a standardized platform that allows customers to deploy different VMs from different vendors for things like security, voice, and WAN optimization. However, Versa picked CA Technologies, specifically, for its ability gather information across a variety of vendors, said Narin

Versa also has its own analytics platform, but it only focuses on its own features and capabilities. “It doesn’t cover any other vendor or the other parts of the network we aren’t in, Narin said. “For example, to get visibility from SD-WAN, we’d want to focus on getting information from the existing underlay devices like routers or switches, and that’s where CA comes in.”

Versa’s own analytics platform provides information about its applications, bandwidth, and link throughput. CA also gathers analytics on Versa’s network components, but it is able to supplement Versa’s data with information from the rest of the network, which provides more context — especially in a multivendor environment.

CA Technologies has made a push to integrate its analytics platform with SD-WAN vendors. For example, in May the vendor released a new version of its monitoring software to include support for SD-WAN architectures built on Cisco’s IWAN and Viptela.