SD-WAN vendor FatPipe today announced plans to deliver its SD-WAN services on Ciena's universal consumer premise equipment (uCPE). Together the two companies aim to develop new service delivery models for communication services providers while at the same time providing customers with greater flexibility.

FatPipe's SD-WAN software stack will run as a virtual network function (VNF) on Ciena's 3906 and 3926 uCPE platforms, each of which sport 1-Gb/s and 10-Gb/s Ethernet capabilities, respectively.

"Service providers are seeking strong, long-term collaborators and we are seeing a flight to quality. The maturity of FatPipe's SD-WAN solutions and ease of implementation plus automation of services and resource management with Ciena's uCPE are decisive factors for our customer's NFV success," said Sanch Datta, CTO and President of FatPipe Networks, in a statement.

While uCPE is seeing greater appeal among network operators, a recent Gartner report estimates that about 80% of SD-WAN vendors will continue to rely on black-box applications through 2021.

Today's announcement marks Ciena's second SD-WAN partnership in two months. The networking vendor announced a similar partnership with Silver Peak in December.

Under that partnership, Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN would run on the same Ciena appliances with the ultimate goal of getting enterprises to retire legacy edge routers, firewalls, and WAN optimization applications in favor of managed services powered by its software.

In an earlier interview with SDxCentral, Silver Peak VP of Technical Alliances Fraser Street said NFV and uCPE are becoming an increasingly important market for the company.