Another day, another new angle on software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN). Versa Networks today announced optimization for voice and video within its SD-WAN technology.

SD-WAN, by its very definition, optimizes traffic over different connections. But Versa is now optimizing unified communications (UC) from the end user’s perspective, ensuring the best possible experience of applications such as Skype, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams.

Versa is doing analysis of more than 150 voice and video codecs, said Rob McBride, director of Versa’s product marketing. The technology uses native median opinion score (MOS), an ITU recommendation that characterizes in a single digit the perceived user experience of a voice or video call. The MOS calculation uses metrics about latency, jitter, loss, and delay and correlates them into a user experience. The technology can steer traffic based on the actual experience of the session as captured by a MOS score.

“We’re opening up the voice or video packet and then using that knowledge to say ‘we need to make some potential changes,’” said McBride.

Versa said this new technology boosts the value of its SD-WAN. “It’s us wanting to strengthen our overall SD-WAN and recognizing the need to move up the stack versus focusing only on the pipes,” said McBride.

Service providers can bundle Versa's SD-WAN with their unified communications offerings.

Versa says these features also allow customers to further consolidate appliances at the branch. The Versa Cloud IP Platform can host third-party virtualized session border controllers (vSBCs) via its embedded kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor and deliver advanced service chaining based on the MOS and codec metrics.