Cisco SD-WAN customers can now route traffic on demand over Equinix’s network of more than 225 data centers, making good on a promise made at Cisco Live this spring.

The offering allows customers to automatically deploy and manage Cisco's SD-WAN gateways on Equinix’s global network from a single unified management console in a matter of minutes.

Traditionally, SD-WAN overlays have been used over broadband or MPLS circuits managed by a telecom or managed service provider. The partnership with Equinix provides customers an alternative to MPLS circuits, which can be slow to deploy and expensive to maintain, while retaining many of the performance and stability advantages over broadband.

The move underscores a trend in the SD-WAN space around middle-mile connectivity. To date, Cisco has announced numerous integrations with large cloud and colocation providers, including Megaport, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud (GCP).

“If I can extend SD-WAN to the cloud for the workload, can I use the cloud as my transit network,” Raj Gulani, senior director of product management for enterprise cloud and SD-WAN at Cisco, explained in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “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.”

Middle-mile networks aren’t without challenges. According to Cisco, one of the most glaring is visibility. When using a middle mile network, the first and last mile is usually routed over broadband or direct internet access, leaving ambiguity as to where network disruptions are taking place. That’s where a recent ThousandEyes SD-WAN integration comes into play.

Acquired early last year in a deal valued at $1 billion dollars, Cisco aims to use ThousandEyes' network performance monitoring platform to make more informed decisions about how they route their traffic over the network.

Beyond helping customers choose the right middle-mile provider for their specific application, Cisco claims ThousandEyes will eventually inform SD-WAN policy, enabling customers to dynamically reroute traffic over various broadband, MPLS, and middle-mile networks as disruptions arise.

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

The company claims it's working to deliver this capability in the not-too-distant future.

Cisco isn’t the only vendor getting in on the middle-mile fun either. Middle-mile connectivity and cloud on-ramps have garnered a lot of attention in recent months as SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) vendors look to provide alternatives to MPLS that can still provide greater performance or reliability than broadband or direct internet access.

“Middle-mile partnerships bring a level of predictability and performance assurance to the SD-WAN that one would have had with private services like MPLS,” Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, said in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “Now customers can have the cost benefits of SD-WAN combined with the performance of private networks.”

Earlier this year, Versa and Fortinet announced partnerships with Apcela and Megaport, respectively, to provide a middle-mile, WAN-on-demand option to their customers. Meanwhile, VMware and Aruba announced integrations with content delivery network and domain name service (DNS) security vendor Cloudflare, which operates a massive backbone network with more than 200 locations around the world.