KDDI Europe, a London-based subsidiary of KDDI Corporation, will provide Silver Peak’s software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology to its enterprise customers. KDDI Europe had been using another SD-WAN vendor, which it declined to name. But the service provider switched to Silver Peak because it was more versatile and priced at about 50 percent cheaper than the previous solution.

KDDI Europe’s SD-WAN offering will be powered by Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect technology. The service provider plans to offer a range of tiered managed SD-WAN services to its midsize and large cloud-connected enterprises with dozens to hundreds of geographically distributed locations.

Although KDDI Europe is headquartered in London, it serves enterprise customers all over the world. It provides many of its connections via lease agreements with other service providers. And it needed an SD-WAN that could easily be overlaid on those connections.

Nick Polydorou, deputy director of network sales for KDDI Europe, said a few years ago the company white labeled another SD-WAN product. “But it did not fit with what our customers expected in terms of portability of the solution and monetarily,” he said. “It was quite expensive and not a true SD-WAN that we wanted to have. We reached out to Silver Peak about 18 months ago. Silver Peak fit the profile of ease of use and portability and ability to overlay.”

KDDI Europe is not white labeling Silver Peak. Rather, it’s integrating the technology within its own network offerings. “In looking at all the competitors and in our own test labs we found that Silver Peak’s EdgeConnect and associated orchestrator was much more versatile and easier to spin up new sites into the environment,” said Polydorou.

Silver Peak’s EdgeConnect encompasses a product family. “Our solution can be deployed as software on a box we can ship, or on a white label uCPE box, on any hypervisor, or in the cloud,” said Shayne Stubbs, vice president of service provider and cloud for Silver Peak.

Stubbs said Silver Peak’s local internet breakout capability will provide KDDI with a good use case. “A lot of times the best path to connect applications is local,” he said. “We have First-Packet iQ where we can support local internet breakout.” He explained that sometimes it’s more efficient to not backhaul traffic to the core of a network. The ability to send some lower priority traffic directly to the cloud from any branch gives better performance. “In some cases you want to bring traffic to the backbone, and in some cases you don’t,” he said.

Polydorou said KDDI Corporation, the parent company of KDDI Europe, has an overarching corporate strategy to provide SD-WAN. But each of its subsidiaries is free to choose their own SD-WAN technology. "We’re very autonomous and choose whichever product we feel fits the rubric of our region,” he said.