Nuage Networks has landed its first sizable cloud project, providing a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture for the greenfield buildout of carrier-backed Numergy in France.

It's Nuage's first deal with a cloud provider, following the announcement of a win with medical center UPMC. Terms weren't released, but it sounds like Numergy is a pretty big job.

Numergy is a soverign-French version of Amazon Web Services, a cloud provider that was developed, conceptually, in four months by nationwide carrier SFR. With partial backing from the French government, Numergy will be useful for those cases where regulations don't allow data to cross borders, but it's also being marketed as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) play for European companies in general. (A second government-sponsored effort, Cloudwatt, has the backing of carrier Orange.)

Numergy is targeting revenues of $400 million per year and, according to Khandekar, hopes to host 1 million virtual machines within three years.

Nuage is being used at the heart of Numergy's cloud. For WAN gateways, Numergy is using the 7750 Service Router from Alcatel-Lucent, Nuage's patron company. (Nuage is an Alcatel-Lucent spin-in.)

Numergy's cloud is based on OpenStack and the KVM hypervisor. The provider will be using Nuage's Virtualized Services Platform (VSP), which includes: an SDN controller, a policy element, directory functionality, and Nuage's Virtual Routing & Switching (VRS).

Numergy will also use Nuage's 7850 Virtualized Services Gateway (VSG), the vendor's 96-port 10-Gb/s gateway system.

The deal gets Nuage into what should be a long-term commitment. Numergy plans to build 10 data centers during the next three years. The first two are due to come online this year, with one, near Paris, set to activate in April, says Houman Modarres, Nuage's senior director of marketing.

It's also worth noting that SFR was one of the reference customers Nuage named when it first launched almost exactly one year ago.

Nuage expects to announce more customers later in April — possibly one in Japan and one in Europe — to bring the number of announced customers up to five or six, Modarres says. The company claims to be in about 30 customer trials.