flexiWAN Open Source SD-WAN Platform Hits GA

flexiWAN launched the first stable release of its open-source SD-WAN platform, which is available through one of the company’s hardware partners: Advantech, Lanner, and Silicom. flexiWAN launched the first stable release of its open-source SD-WAN platform, which is available through one of the company’s hardware partners: Advantech, Lanner, and Silicom. “This release is a major milestone for flexiWAN and our community as it is the world’s first production-ready open and community-driven SD-WAN solution,” said Amir Zmora, CEO and co-founder of flexiWAN, in a statement. “Our innovation and openness doesn’t stop at the technical level. By offering our services as a freemium business model, along with publicly sharing our pricing and source code with the community, we strive to lead the industry to more openness.” flexiWAN made waves in early 2019 when it announced plans to join the SD-WAN space with an open architecture. Since entering the fray, flexiWAN has moved aggressively to bring its SD-WAN platform to market. Today’s release comes less than six months after the company launched its public beta in late July. In an earlier email with SDxCentral, Zmora described a future where flexiWAN was the No. 1 deployed SD-WAN on the market, similar to what pfSense did for firewalls. flexiWAN is designed to run on any x86-based white box. The company has, however, partnered with several hardware vendors in large communications projects. Zmora said the company’s aim is to eliminate vendor lock-in by allowing for interoperability with third-party applications and open the door for service providers to develop specialized networking applications that allow them to further differentiate from the competition. With the first stable release of the software, flexiWAN also announced a bevy of new features and capabilities including multi-tenant management, zero-touch provisioning, support for IPsec over VxLAN tunnels, and internet breakout. flexiWAN also debuted a series of new management and billing tools, and a community-driven pricing model that is based on a poll of several thousand enterprises, services providers, and system integrators. This includes a month-to-month payment option that the company claims is unique in the SD-WAN market. The flexiWAN source code, including the code for its flexiManager and flexiEdge, was made available late last month. The source code does not include the company’s flexiWAN billing system or UI, which is deployed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. In the past year, the open-source SD-WAN vendor has seen strong interest among service providers. In late 2019, flexiWAN penned a deal with Spanish telecommunications company 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 involves testing flexiWAN’s performance for consumer branches that need throughputs from 50 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s of encrypted traffic.