Orange Helps Siemens Hit 80% SD-WAN Migration

Just in time for the holidays, Orange Business Services announced a major milestone in its nearly $300 million contract to migrate German conglomerate Siemens to an SD-WAN architecture. Just in time for the holidays, Orange Business Services announced a major milestone in its nearly $300 million contract to migrate German conglomerate Siemens to an SD-WAN architecture. The service provider said it transitioned 80% of Siemens’ global network to its Flexible SD-WAN offering, just two years into the six-year contract. Siemens has more than 1,000 sites and campuses in 94 countries on five continents. The companies achieve this milestone despite the ongoing pandemic, which has dramatically increased bandwidth demands on Orange’s global network as teams around the globe have transitioned to remote work. Orange’s Flexible SD-WAN offering forms the basis for Siemens’ SDN project. However, in this context, SDN, which usually stands for software-defined networking, is a play on words that stands for Siemens Digitalization Network. The project aims to secure the multinational’s IT infrastructure and increase performance across the organization. To achieve this goal Siemens tapped Orange, which began deploying its managed SD-WAN offering in 2018. Orange’s Flexible SD-WAN is a multi-layered, policy-based SD-WAN platform that uses a variety of vendor technologies including those from Cisco Viptela, Riverbed, and Fortinet, depending on customer needs. The offering boasts a bevy of networking and security functionality including distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, SSL encryption, a combination of on-premises and cloud-based firewalls, and additional security services through Orange’s Cyber Security Operations Center. In the case of Siemens, Orange deployed Cisco’s Viptela universal CPE (uCPE) hardware and networking platform, which features centralized cloud management and communications capabilities, designed to reduce reliance on expensive MPLS circuits by shifting traffic over to internet underlays. Orange claims to have helped Siemens realize significant cost savings in Brazil, where the company has three sites. Additionally, the company has noted reduced loads on its MPLS network in the United Kingdom and Mexico since completing the migration.