Teridion is a company that uses SDN as an overlay on top of other carriers’ networks to optimize the flow of traffic. And Citrix offers SD-WAN. Now the two companies are working together to combine their overlay networks, reaching the first mile, middle mile, and last mile for the benefit of enterprises.

Teridion has made a name for itself with software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers such as Box, Atlassian, and Salesforce.

“SaaS providers run their businesses on top of our overlay networks,” said Pejman Roshan, Teridion’s VP of products and marketing. “We provide the acceleration, making bi-directional traffic and file transfers faster. We bring reliability to the network as well. We’re nearly at five-nines availability.”

Teridion builds out its network by using the networks of public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and another 20 or so smaller public cloud providers. “Our network stitches together and interconnects all the public cloud networks, and each of their data centers become our points of presence as well,” said Roshan. “We have more than 300 PoPs globally.”

The Teridion network optimizes “the middle mile” of connectivity, which it defines as the connections between public cloud providers and ISPs, but where enterprises have no control.

Derek Thorslund, senior director of product management at Citrix, said the company’s SD-WAN “provides secure and reliable ‘last mile’ connectivity between enterprise locations and the cloud.”

And Roshan added, “Citrix is tying in on the first and last mile and integrating with us on the middle mile.”

Since both vendors provide network overlay technologies, their collaboration sounds a bit like an overlay tech on top of another overlay tech.

“It’s possible for us to run a tunnel over a tunnel to get the benefits of both solutions,” said Roshan. “There are things that are not only complementary but also additive. He said the collaboration brings SaaS connectivity that’s tied tightly to the corporate WAN.

“This initial offering integrates our products at the IPSec VPN level,” said Thorslund. “Citrix makes it easy for customers to configure branch office SD-WAN appliances at scale. Looking down the road, we anticipate that Teridion will deploy Citrix SD-WAN virtual appliances in the cloud, too. This will enable more advanced performance and reliability features supported by Citrix SD-WAN, such as link bonding, brownout handling and selective packet duplication.”

Thorslund said the arrangement also reduces latency for enterprise SaaS applications. “In the old way, you had to backhaul all traffic for a SaaS application from your branch to the data center," he said. "You were adding a lot latency. We’re providing the connectivity from the branch to the cloud. Teridion has been providing the best route from SaaS to cloud, which is going to be a lower latency, shorter distance connection. Put the two together, and this gives our mutual customers a complete end-to-end solution for connectivity.”

Teridion’s technology for enterprises also works with existing SD-WAN deployments from other vendors, including Cisco Meraki and Silver Peak.