Huawei says it has introduced openness at three layers of its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN): at the universal customer premises equipment (uCPE), at the orchestration layer, and at the interfaces to connect to multiple clouds. In addition, the company has worked with partners to create this “three-layered SD-WAN” architecture.

Huawei has been talking about its SD-WAN technology for a couple of years. In 2017 it said it was using its existing AR-Series routers at enterprise locations to provide its business customers with SD-WAN. The AR-Series include different size uCPEs built on x86 blades that can run virtual workloads. And Huawei said its SD-WAN is orchestrated by its Huawei Agile Controller.

Today, Huawei said its SD-WAN can also run on uCPE based on ARM64 architecture. Its x86 or ARM-based uCPE provide an open platform that currently supports more than 10 mainstream virtual network functions (VNFs). The VNFs include virtual firewalls from Huawei, Riverbed Technology, and F5. For a virtual WAN optimization controller, Huawei and Riverbed Technology signed a deal to combine Riverbed’s SteelHead with Huawei's WAN optimization.

The updated SD-WAN technology also provides openness at the application control layer. Huawei’s Agile Controller can now interoperate with third-party application orchestration vendors and back-office support systems via open standard RESTful APIs. The company is currently working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for Huawei's SD-WAN technology to be orchestrated by HPE's Service Director using open APIs.**

For cloud interconnection, Huawei’s SD-WAN can be deployed on multiple mainstream public clouds, such as telecom carrier clouds and Microsoft Azure, as well as on Huawei's own public cloud.

At Huawei Connect in September 2017, Guo Ping, one of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, said the company predicts that, ultimately, there will be five major clouds in the world. And Huawei aims for its Huawei cloud to be one of them. The company announced a partnership with Microsoft at the time for Microsoft applications to be released on the Huawei cloud.

**After this story was published, HPE said it is not partnering with Huawei.