Fortinet signed a whopper of an SD-WAN deal to fortify Burger King's Brazilian franchise with its Secure SD-WAN platform. The meat of the deal calls for Fortinet to deliver a hybrid-WAN deployment to all of Burger King Brazil's Burger King and Popeyes locations in the country.

Since entering Brazil nearly 20 years ago, Burger King Brazil has opened more than 800 locations. Meanwhile Popeyes, a subsidiary of Burger King Brazil, joined the fun in 2018, and has since opened 23 locations. As part of the deal, Fortinet has already deployed is SD-WAN platform in 70 of the 823 locations.

According to Fortinet, Burger King Brazil is already seeing lower WAN costs by transitioning off of MPLS connections to a hybrid WAN using multiple broadband links. The vendor also claims Burger King Brazil's operations teams have managed to reduce the total number of open-connectivity related incidents by roughly 26%.

"Fortinet’s security-driven networking approach to SD-WAN offers customers like Burger King Brazil increased performance, visibility, and control without sacrificing overall security,” explained John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet, in a statement.

South Africa-based CMC networks and Miami-based Neutrona Networks announced a joint partnership to extend the reach of their managed service offerings, which include SD-WAN.

Under the agreement, CMC will extend its reach into the Latin American market with more than 30 points of presence (PoP) made available by Neutrona. In return, Neutrona will gain access to more than 100 of CMC's PoPs throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Using preexisting network-to-network interconnects (NNIs) in Brazil and the U.S., both companies will also offer customers lower latency by providing a direct alternative to existing North American routes.

"The ethos of both CMC and Neutrona is built around customer experience, digital transformation, and innovation," said Marisa Trisolino, CEO of CMC Networks. "Each company is a regional leader in providing SD-WAN and access to cloud services, so we are in an excellent position to drive collaboration and innovation in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East."

SD-WAN vendor Criterion Networks this month announced the general availability of its SDCloud platform, which aims to help managed service providers evaluate SD-WAN platforms.

The platform is designed with service providers in mind, allowing them to spin up custom, hosted environments where they can test SD-WAN platforms to determine which offers the best go-to-market strategy. These environments can also be used to perform proof-of-concept (PoC) tests for customers.

"Leading analyst research shows that almost 95% of enterprises expect to be using SD-WAN within 24 months, so service providers are rushing to bring managed services to market and engaging customers on their SD-WAN journey," said Srinivas Vegesna, CEO of Criterion Networks, in a statement. "Across SD-WAN, security, and other virtual network service use-cases, Criterion accelerated customer PoC time by 70% while providing excellent customer engagement and user experience."

Alongside the launch of SDCloud, Criterion is also announcing a service provider partnership with Tata Communications. The service provider plans to leverage Criterion's SDCloud to deliver a hosted virtual SD-WAN environment that can conduct sales demos and PoC testing.