Sify Technologies, headquartered in Chennai, India, launched an SD-WAN service built on Cisco’s SD-WAN technology.

The Indian service provider delivers telecommunications services over a common telecom data network infrastructure reaching more than 1,550 municipalities in India. This telecom network connects 45 data centers across the country.

Sify’s SD-WAN is offered as a managed service that can be delivered over the combination of any type of link: broadband, MPLS, LTE, microwave, and satellite. The managed service was launched after successful trials with customers.

The SD-WAN technology advances Sify’s “Cloud@Core” vision. “As customers continue to move critical workloads to both the public and hybrid cloud, SD-WAN becomes a critical part of the network strategy for them,” said Sify CEO Kamal Nath, in a statement.

Just last week, Cisco announced that it was ready to upgrade more than 1 million of its existing routers to its Viptela SD-WAN technology. The Viptela software can run on all of Cisco’s ISR and ASR routers, as well as ENCS 5000 routers, that are 4 years old or younger.

In an email to SDxCentral, Cisco said the news with Sify was “not directly related” to the Viptela news from last week, apparently meaning that Sify was not upgrading existing routers. “However, we did discuss the enormous success we’ve had growing Viptela since the acquisition, and the announcement with Sify is a proof point of that growth,” according to Cisco’s spokesperson.

At the time of its acquisition by Cisco, Viptela’s technology was deployed with about 200 customers. Since Viptela joined Cisco, that same SD-WAN product has been deployed to almost 1,000 customers.

The Cisco spokesperson today said, “Most enterprises within Asia have the WAN delivered as a managed service by a service provider. Although SD-WAN delivers flexibility to the enterprises, the predominant model is still through a service provider.”