Sweden-based mobile network operator Telia Carrier today announced Cisco Viptela would form the basis of its international SD-WAN offering.

The company says the ability to remotely provision Viptela on customer's existing WAN hardware makes it ideally suited to meet the growing demands of enterprises across Europe, North America, and parts of the Asia Pacific market.

"Our on-prem platform is based on a distance solution, so we want to keep the ability to order and decommission services on the fly without doing any manual labor on the side, and in order to do that we need to have something that is compatible with the universal CPE that's based at the customer premise," said Joakim Palm, global product manager at Telia. "This actually means we can deploy a Viptela solution to an existing customer."

Further, Palm says customers are looking for an SD-WAN platform that allows them to control the configuration of the network.

"What we're doing is we're deploying the Cisco Viptela platform remotely, and we're handing over the keys to the customer when we're done," he said. "The customer actually has access to the Viptela interface and can configure it as they like, but the difference is they don't have to do any of the deployment and they don't have to do any of the provisioning."

The service will be offered in both a fully managed and co-managed model, offering customers various degrees of control over their WAN.

The SD-WAN announcement comes just over a month after Telia announced a partnership with Cisco to launch a 400 gigabit Ethernet (GbE)-ready network based on the vendor's cloud-scale routing platform. The network powers Telia’s global backbone network that reaches 120 countries.

Telia expects SD-WAN demand to explode over the next three years, citing a recent Gartner report that found 60% of enterprises are planning to implement SD-WAN by 2023, and more than 80% planning to adopt a hybrid WAN that combines both MPLS and low-cost broadband.

Telia's Nordic divisions have also launched national SD-WAN offerings in recent months, the latest of which features Nokia's Nuage SD-WAN platform in January.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect comments made by Palm.