NEC is joining forces with Infovista to bring SD-WAN to the NEC's Smart Enterprise Suite.

The partnership will enable NEC to deliver its software-defined unified communication platform — part of the company's Smart Enterprise Suite — over Infovista's Ipanema SD-WAN. NEC claims the combination will lower costs and improve communications performance across its communications offerings.

Key to this plan is SD-WAN's ability to prioritize network traffic including specific unified communications sessions across both the LAN and the WAN. According to Joshua Bancroft, a senior research analyst at IHS Markit, who was cited in the release, SD-WAN's ability to steer high-priority voice traffic over the most cost-effective WAN links while maintaining voice quality makes the technology highly attractive to enterprises that rely on unified communications.

"This functionality is an important deployment driver for UC-using enterprises as they can increase the reliability of voice communications by having WAN links bonded from multiple service providers," he said.

Infovista earlier this year claimed that its SD-WAN business had more than 450 customers globally and more than 40,000 sites deployed with Ipanema across 115 countries. According to IHS, Infovista was ranked No. 10 based on worldwide SD-WAN revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018. However, its market share had plunged 21%, which Infovista indicated was a result of prospects waiting for an update to its Ipanema SD-WAN that dropped this past March.

“By partnering with Infovista and positioning Ipanema SD-WAN alongside NEC’s Smart Enterprise Suite, we are confident that we can provide application-intelligent SD-WAN solutions to a vast array of businesses in a manner that delivers positive ROI and prioritizes quality of experience for users,” said Ram Menghani, SVP of product management at NEC, in a statement.

NEC says the Ipanema SD-WAN is well suited to an array of application suites including those for biometrics and video flows. This versatility will allow customers to eliminate expensive hardware while maintaining the same quality of experience for voice and business applications.