Telia’s Finnish subsidiary Sonera announced that is has picked Nokia’s Nuage virtualized network services (VNS) product portfolio to provide software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) services to its enterprise customers in Europe.

Sonera said it picked Nuage because many of Sonera's customers' network services are becoming more cloud-based and the company needed to help smooth the transition.

Nuage’s technology doesn't just focus on finding the best WAN connection, it connects any user to any application.

“In our view, the technology’s key strengths are the way it takes into account legacy networking and interworking with those, especially MPLS-VPN, and thus is very well suited for a telco, whose strengths lie in the same area, as a technology platform to build SD-WAN with,” said a Sonera spokesperson.

Nuage’s VNS portfolio will also enable Sonera to implement its software-defined networking (SDN) controller and SD-WAN orchestrator, which will allow the telco to control customer networks and their policies from a centralized point. Using Nuage’s application programming interfaces (APIs), Sonera can create its own customer-facing portions of the service, like a self-service portal, for example.

Sonera’s SD-WAN supports 4G, 3G, LTE, and fixed Internet broadband connections. It can also support hybrid networking with its existing MPLS-VPN services (called DataNet) by uniting MPLS-VPN and SD-WAN overlay through a centralized routing point in Telia’s infrastructure.

Most of Sonera’s customer deals involve existing DataNet customers that want to move selected sites, usually smaller branch offices, on top of the Internet and keep using MPLS-VPN on their larger sites and data centers, a Sonera spokesperson said.

The launch covers Sonera's home market including Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.