Telefónica kicks the tires on open source SD-WAN with flexiWAN

So far, so good for open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN. To wit: FlexiWAN announced on Wednesday that it has been working with Telefónica ahead of proof-of-concept (PoC) trials next year.   So far, so good for open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN. To wit: FlexiWAN announced on Wednesday that it has been working with Telefónica ahead of proof-of-concept (PoC) trials next year.   Telefónica and flexiWAN started their collaboration in June, and plan to run flexiWAN's open source, modular SD-WAN solution on white box customer premises equipment next year. The PoCs will test flexiWAN on customers branches that need throughput from 50 Mbps to 1 Gig of encrypted traffic. "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," said flexiWAN CEO and co-flounder Amir Zmora, in a statement. "With this, we enjoy access to leading technology companies for integration and cooperation for enhancing flexiWAN as well as better understanding of the enterprise market needs." FlexiWAN's software includes a centrally managed SD-WAN solution in open source that has integration points in the core of the systems that can integrate third-party logic from various companies. Zmora has been on a mission this year to rattle the SD-WAN sector by giving service providers and enterprises a choice on how they define their SD-WAN services, instead of letting vendors define them. Working with a service provider such as Telefónica is a validation of flexiWAN's technology and approach. "An open-source SD-WAN solution has been of interest to communication service providers (CSPs) like Telefónica," said Roy Chua, founder and principal at AvidThink. "The general CSP move to uCPE-based solutions was a desire to avoid lock-in from the SD-WAN vendors. Going with an open-source SD-WAN solution like flexiWAN's is a step beyond that. To have Telefónica willing to share that they are working with flexiWAN is a significant milestone in flexiWAN acceptance and adoption." By enabling third-party integration, flexiWAN can break vendor lock-in by creating an open source ecosystem with vendors that specialize in various areas such as deep packet inspection (DPI), security, WAN optimization, session border control, VoIP, and other traffic-specific optimization logic. The core flexiWAN solution also can enable application-specific detection and optimization logic by software-as-a-service applications. It also can integrate with open source DevOps tools, and even with other SD-WAN vendors. FlexiWAN came to light in April, and since then more than 800 telcos, managed service providers, system integrators and enterprises have contacted Zmora to request information or to conduct PoC trials. In August, flexiWAN put its SD-WAN software into public beta for downloading. Additionally, Enea teamed up with flexiWAN and Intel on a proof-of-concept demo during October's SDN NFV World Congress conference. Zmora previously said that flexiWAN planned on releasing a fully-packaged SD-WAN solution into open source by year's end that will include its flexiEdge and flexiManage offerings. Consider that all but done. "The code will be on GitHub at the end of December," Zmora said in an email to FierceTelecom. "The flexiWAN production version is planned to be released by then as well. We are closing the last things in testing, packaging and documentation."