Alaskan service provider GCI has deployed Juniper's Contrail software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) as part of the carrier's virtual managed service platform, CloudFlex SD-WAN.

“They are the first customer to publicly announce the deployment of our complete SD-WAN solution,” said Sally Bament, VP of service provider marketing at Juniper Networks, in an email to SDxCentral. “We have other customers in various stages of deployment, one of them being a large carrier, whom we expect to announce shortly.”

Juniper markets its SD-WAN technology to both large enterprises and service provider customers. “For service providers our goal is to help them build a platform for virtualized managed services delivery,” said Bament.

GCI's CloudFlex enabled by Juniper's Contrail SD-WAN is comprised of Contrail Service Orchestration software, the NFX250 Network Services Platform of hardware, the SRX Series Services Gateway hardware, and the vSRX Virtual Firewall.

Bament said once the hardware elements of Contrail SD-WAN are deployed, enterprises can use these same devices to deploy additional virtual network functions (VNFs) without needing to install additional physical appliances or dispatch humans on-site to provision services.

The SD-WAN technology also allows GCI to expand into regions across the United States outside of its traditional footprint.

Juniper unveiled its Cloud-Enabled Branch (CEB) in June 2016, and said at the time that CEB would do SD-WAN and more.

But after its announcement, the vendor has been relatively quiet on the subject of SD-WAN. This is in contrast to all of its competitors and almost all the major global telcos that have pounced on SD-WAN technology.

During its third quarter 2017 earnings call, one analyst asked Juniper CEO Rami Rahim why the company’s name did not come up very often in regard to SD-WAN. Rahim said, “We’ve taken a deliberate strategy” focused on a scalable, multi-tenant, extensible architecture with security built-in. He said Juniper is focused on helping its service provider customers deliver SD-WAN.

There have been some changes at Juniper within its Contrail business. Ankur Singla, who used to head up the business, left the company. And Morgan Dollard, formerly with Google, is now the general manager for Contrail.

We haven’t heard much lately about CEB. But the company is talking about Contrail SD-WAN.