Cisco Viptela will power New York-based cable network provider Altice USA's entrance into the managed SD-WAN service provider market.

The seventh-largest cable network operator in the U.S., Altice offers television, internet, and telephone services to about 3.3 million people and 370,000 businesses in 21 states. And now, thanks to a partnership with Cisco, the company plans to begin offering SD-WAN to its enterprise customers.

To do this, the service provider will use Cisco's Managed Service Accelerator (MSX) to manage and deploy the company's Viptela SD-WAN platform to its enterprise customers.

Cisco says MSX, which was designed with service providers in mind, will enable Altice to quickly and securely manage and deploy a wide array of SDN technologies — SD-WAN being the first — to its customers.

"With Cisco MSX, Altice USA can enable faster innovation and increase customer satisfaction by speeding time-to-market for SD-WAN, and other managed and on-demand services,” said Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cisco's cloud platform and solutions group.

Altice expects the service to go live in the second quarter of 2020.

While the deal isn't likely to impact Cisco's considerable share of the SD-WAN market, the partnership represents a lucrative move into a fairly new market for the networking giant: the cable industry.

However, Altice is far from the first cable provider to jump into the managed SD-WAN service market. In 2017, Charter announced a SD-WAN proof of concept with Nokia Nuage, and the same year Comcast partnered with Versa to bring SD-WAN to its enterprise customers.