Orange Business Services has migrated 1,168 Siemens AG locations in 94 countries to a global SD-WAN using networking equipment from Cisco.

The global nature of the migration combined with the challenges of the pandemic made for an impressive feat of network transformation over the last several years, according to John Isch, director, Connectivity Solutions for the Americas at Orange Business Services.

While there are larger SD-WAN deployments out there, what makes the Siemens’ network unique is that Siemens is a global enterprise, Isch said. “Usually [SD-WAN migrations] are retail — and even if they are this size, they are probably not global,” he said. “Having a large global deployment of 1,200 sites in 94 countries and being a complicated enterprise environment is very impressive from my perspective.” 

Isch told SDxCentral that working with Siemens was a “best-case scenario” because the company was already a long-standing MPLS customer that came to Orange with a business strategy to digitize their entire environment. 

“The business strategy drove an infrastructure strategy, and we were there to help with that,” he said. “It was a move from applications that were previously in the data center toward the cloud. … It really changed everything inside Siemens.”

One of the biggest changes involved implementing a cloud-based security platform along with intelligence at the edge via the SD-WAN — all on a global scale and with secure access service edge (SASE) from the start, which upon reflection was rare at the time, said Isch. “Security usually came in at the end of the sales cycle."

“With Siemens, they really have engaged on both the security and the infrastructure side at the same time to create this environment for their users and for their applications,” he said. “If you went back and looked at the Siemens network today, you'd say, oh, yeah, that's a SASE network, that’s a SASE engagement, but nobody called it that at the time.”

With the SD-WAN network up and running, the benefits are already clear, Isch noted. “It's more efficient. It's cost effective. And, you know, it really does meet the customer's requirements,” he said. “Twelve hundred sites is an impressive number, but the more impressive number is that over 300,000 employees use this system — and where they are and how they operate is globally consistent because of the way this entire environment is architected.”