Cisco over the past 18 month announced a slew of partnerships with colocation vendors and public cloud providers in a bid to extend the reach of its SD-WAN offerings.

But according to Raj Gulani, senior director of product management for enterprise cloud and SD-WAN at Cisco, these partnerships are the foundation of a much grander play, one that will eventually leverage the networking giant’s ThousandEyes platform to shape routing policy across any WAN.

Cisco’s WAN-on-demand strategy

To date, Cisco has announced partnerships with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Equinix, and Megaport.

According to Gulani, these partnerships were born out of demand from customers and partners for ways to extend their existing SD-WAN fabrics to workloads outside of the corporate data center.

Customers don’t want to be locked into a single cloud, and they want to deploy workloads in the cloud with their existing talent pool, he said. “The rest of the conversation was ‘how do you deploy it securely, reliably.’”

By partnering with the colocation and cloud providers, Cisco was able to provide optimized routing directly to the workload and also take advantage of the massive, high-performance backbone networks connecting each of these provider’s data centers.

“If I can extend SD-WAN to the cloud for the workload, can I use the cloud as my transit network,” Gulani said. “We are able to offer the most comprehensive SD-WAN platform, which can offer on-demand networking because we have automated our partnerships with [software-defined cloud interconnect] vendors, like Megaport, like Equinix, [and] opened up the GCP backbone.”

These integrations effectively allowed Cisco’s SD-WAN platform to automatically configure underlay networks. Essentially, WAN on demand.

The result of this strategy was Cisco could now extend the value of its SD-WAN platform to any topology and support its customers regardless of whether the workloads were running in cloud, a colocation facility, or in a private data center, Gulani said.

“We managed to not only offer you the overlay fabric orchestration, and visibility, and policy, but also the underlay, which means now we can have a true end-to-end fabric overlay, underlay, and give that control to the IT of our enterprises,” he said.

The visibility challenge

While this strategy offered customers a higher performance and more flexible alternative to MPLS or broadband, it also introduced new challenges for network visibility, he explained.

Cisco acquired ThousandEyes in early 2020 in a deal valued at $1 billion. Earlier this year, the company extended ThousandEye’s network performance monitoring agents to its Viptela SD-WAN appliances.

“ThousandEyes became a very critical asset to completing the picture, because we were blind to the internet,” Gulani said. “Everything outside of the enterprise WAN – which actually impacts the entire enterprise today because the internet is one of the primary WAN links – we have no visibility into that.”

This integration allows customers to make informed decisions about how they route their traffic over the network, he explained. “What does an internet link offer me compared to an MPLS link, compared to GCP or Megaport?“

However, quantifying performance and pinpointing network disruptions is only the beginning of what ThousandEyes can do for Cisco’s SD-WAN customers.

Closing the loop

This level of visibility will allow ThousandEyes to inform SD-WAN policy and reroute traffic over different WAN links for better performance or to avoid disruptions, Gulani said.

“Where we can take it forward is a closed-loop telemetry,” he said. “If I see something, and then report on that, can I act on that.”

Gulani admits this capability isn’t available yet, but is something that Cisco is working to deliver in the not-too-distant future.