Ericsson has built its own global network, which it calls Unified Delivery Network (UDN). And that UDN will now be used by Mode to deliver private connectivity and SD-WAN services enabled by Versa Networks, which have been validated as a solution that’s interoperable with Mode.

Ericsson has been building its UDN since February 2016. It was originally conceived as an improved content delivery network (CDN). In a business brief, Ericsson says its UDN leverages the edge networks of service providers to deliver rich media content and other low-latency applications. Ericsson was able to build this network because of its relationships with service providers and the presence of its equipment in their last-mile networks.

But now, the UDN is also being used by Mode to offer connectivity and SD-WAN services from Versa.

The San Francisco-based networking startup Mode recently partnered with Ericsson to deliver what Mode calls its software-defined core (SD-Core), which is a private network-as-a-service for enterprises. Mode’s routing technology can intelligently shift traffic in milliseconds and dynamically adjust to network changes and traffic flows.

“We’ve partnered with Ericsson who has a large backbone network,” said Mode CEO Paul Dawes. “UDN is comprised of partnerships with 90 service providers, and those basically provide the underlying capacity and connectivity to their access network.”

He said UDN is designed as an edge compute network comprised of data centers that are connected by private fiber. “We run a virtual overlay network on top of that framework, using cool technology developed out of Cornell. We are not an SD-WAN provider. We complement any SD-WAN deployment.”

Enter Versa, which will be Mode’s first SD-WAN partner. Mode’s network-as-a-service is already generally available, and Dawes said, “Some of our earliest customers preferred Versa.”

Atchison Frazer, Versa’s head of marketing, said, “We look forward to partnering with Mode to offer a joint cloud-native, software-defined private connectivity solution to augment legacy global WAN infrastructures for our secure SD-WAN customers.”

Aryaka is an SD-WAN vendor that differentiates itself with its global private network. Asked if Mode’s network-as-a-service combined with SD-WAN was a similar offering to Aryaka’s, Dawes said, “I would say that when we look at the value proposition, Aryaka is probably the closest to what we’re doing that incorporates a private backbone network.”

But he tempered that by saying, “Aryaka is built on a traditional telco core network. We are just running blade servers connected by Layer 2 fiber. The economics are quite a bit different. We provide enterprises with private connectivity for 15 to 20 percent of the cost of MPLS.”