Israel-based startup flexiWAN released the first public beta of its open source SD-WAN platform alongside the announcement of dedicated hardware courtesy of Silicom.

The company made waves earlier this year when it announced plans to join the SD-WAN space with an open architecture. Now the software — still targeted at enterprise and service providers interested in conducting proof-of-concept deployments — is available for public consumption.

CEO and co-founder Amir Zmora said in an email to SDxCentral that flexiWAN attempts to solve many of the pain points associated with existing SD-WAN solutions by offering a modular open source solution.

“We expect flexiWAN to become the No. 1 deployed SD-WAN in the market, similar to pfSense being the No. 1 deployed firewall,” Zmora said.

The beta can be installed on any virtual machine (VM), bare metal, or cloud platform, or on dedicated hardware including hardware from partner Silicom.

“Our use of Silicom as a hardware partner enables us to provide a turnkey solution, which will allow enterprises and service providers to quickly deploy and on-board flexiWAN for their customers and to solve all the logistics of hardware handling,” said Zmora in a release.

Since opening flexiWAN to select enterprises and service providers in April, the company has garnered widespread interest, with Zmora citing more than 800 PoC requests.

“It’s really exciting to see the market acceptance and willingness of the community to help with development and quality assurance efforts,” he said.

Some of flexiWAN’s core goals are to eliminate vendor lock-in by allowing for interoperability with third-party applications and open the door for service providers to develop specialized networking applications to allow them to further differentiate their services from the competition, Zmora said.

However, Zmora notes that while flexiWAN has already proven capable of this, the company’s next step will be to develop a robust integration framework, which it expects to roll out with the production build in the next few months. While flexiWAN is open for third-party integrations, the goal is to provide a complete SD-WAN solution toward the end of 2019, Zmora said.

For now, the software does come with a few limitations. The public beta is limited to three devices running the company’s flexiEdge software. Companies interested in larger scale deployments before the final release must first contact flexiWAN directly.

“The current beta focuses on the networking infrastructure, but we plan – already in 2019 – to release additional features based on the community priorities we collected,” Zmora said, adding that multilink is one such feature that didn’t make it into the beta.