Managed service provider TPx Communications added Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology to its existing managed SD-WAN delivery platform in order to grow globally, meet the needs of midsize to large enterprise customers, and address new use cases.

TPx's managed SD-WAN delivery platform currently uses VeloCloud, but according to TPx’s Vice President of IPx Managed Services Jared Martin there were several gaps in its offering. These gaps were in cloud connect options, WAN optimization, and complex routing.

“We needed to expand the offer to meet the needs of our growing global clientele and we chose Silver Peak as its proven WAN optimization capabilities, along with its advanced networking capabilities take us from the crawl/walk stage to the running stage with our SD-WAN offer,” said Martin.

In addition to WAN optimization, Silver Peak will enable TPx to deliver a range of tiered managed SD-WAN services, offer router replacement with routing interoperability for customers that don’t require a full-blown router, use a combination of transport including 4G LTE, accelerate application performance over broadband with dynamic path conditioning, and secure local Internet breakout for direct branch to cloud application access.

Many of these capabilities were included in the selection criteria for TPx as the carrier looks to expand its services internationally. And it also wants to be able to provide SD-WAN for customers with more than 50 sites.

TPx’s managed SD-WAN platform is vendor agnostic and is offered as both a self-managed and fully-managed platform. Being vendor agnostic enables the platform to be driven by use cases and to “support multiple SD-WAN vendors as the market matures and the use cases further broaden and develop,” said Martin.

“I think for us it’s clear that we’re dealing with a service provider that has had experience with SD-WAN and had success, but they’re moving beyond basic SD-WAN,” said Silver Peak Senior Director of Marketing Nav Chander. “They’re going to take advantage of a number of use cases, not just one, which is going to take them and hopefully grow their business and ours to new levels.”

In leveraging Silver Peak’s SD-WAN capabilities, TPx has already identified four use cases it can now support.

The first is meeting the needs of enterprises for resilient connectivity by combining MPLS, dedicated Internet access, and LTE underlays. “We are strongly looking at 4G LTE as an access option as we expand our SD-WAN solution globally,” said Martin.

Silver Peak, according to Chander, sees this as another emerging use case for SD-WAN, and as a way for TPx to go into new markets “where there is no broadband availability and there’s just wireless. In some of the international sites they [TPx] will be looking at, they will just need to partner with 4G providers to provide dual-LTE connectivity.”

Additionally, WAN optimization will enable local Internet breakout for direct access to cloud-hosted applications, increasing the performance for cloud and data center application access.

The final two use cases are i) accelerated cloud connection options and thin branch integration; and ii) the ability to consolidate branch infrastructure.

The market for SD-WAN has continued to grow, and Chander sees no sign of that stopping soon. “There are going to be more use cases as more enterprises start to get comfortable with SD-WAN,” he said.