Telefónica, flexiWAN Drive Open Source SD-WAN Development

Open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN today announced a partnership with Telefónica to develop a proof-of-concept SD-WAN service designed to run on white-box consumer premises equipment (CPE). Open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN today announced a partnership with Telefónica to develop a proof-of-concept SD-WAN service designed to run on white-box consumer premises equipment (CPE). The partnership, which began in June, will continue through 2020 and involve testing flexiWAN’s performance for consumer branches that need throughputs from 50 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s of encrypted traffic. flexiWAN’s open source SD-WAN platform entered public beta in late July promising to disrupt the market with an open architecture. CEO and co-founder of the Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup Amir Zmora imagines a future where the open standard has become the No. 1 deployed SD-WAN on the market, similar to what pfSense did for firewalls. The partnership between flexiWAN and Telefónica is a first step toward that goal, he said. “Our work with Telefónica allows us to benefit from their vast experience and market reach to enterprises of all sizes and segments as well as to technology companies,” Zmora said in a statement. “With this, we enjoy access to leading technology companies for integration and cooperation for enhancing flexiWAN as well as a better understanding of the enterprise market needs.” flexiWAN describes the current state of the SD-WAN market as a red ocean where differentiation between players is increasingly difficult and traditional SD-WAN vendor‘s products are black boxes that limit innovation. As an alternative to this, flexiWAN says its open source software can be installed on any virtual machine, bare metal, cloud platform, or on dedicated hardware. According to Zmora, flexiWAN’s core goals include eliminating vendor lock-in by allowing for interoperability with third-party applications and opening the door for service providers to develop specialized networking applications that allow them to further differentiate from the competition. Juan Campillo, director of connectivity and innovation at Telefónica, says this vision aligns with Telefónica’s open network strategy. “Thanks to the openness of solutions like flexiWAN, Telefónica can better control the value chain fostering innovation, reducing complexity as well as adapting the product to companies with less networking knowledge and to a larger variety of enterprise networking needs,” he said in a statement.