Huawei, SoftBank, Microsoft, Riverbed Technology, F5, and EANTC report on their SD-WAN Cooperation

At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018, Huawei, SoftBank, Microsoft, Riverbed Technology, F5, and the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) held a press conference to discuss SD-WAN business development and ecosystem cooperation. At the conference, Huawei reported on the latest progress in SD-WAN commercial deployment and announced partnerships with these companies in public cloud, network optimization, security, and other domains. To this day, Huawei is the only SD-WAN vendor to have passed the strict tests of EANTC, an internationally recognized third-party test center. Huawei will continue to build an Intent-Driven Network in the All-Cloud era through open cooperation.

Huawei has launched the uCPEs (universal CPE) AR1610 and AR650 for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Built on the ARM or X86 architecture, these two uCPEs provide an open platform for the SD-WAN ecosystem and support the provisioning of over 10 mainstream value-added services (VAS) in minutes, including virtual fire walls (vFWs) and virtual WAN optimization controllers (vWOCs). They provide cost-effective SD-WAN enterprise interconnection services for SMEs. With Huawei's SD-WAN solution, SoftBank has delivered high-quality and highly reliable enterprise interconnection services for enterprise customers. Mr Hiroki Taketsuna, Senior Director, NWS 1st Division, SoftBank Corp. stated, "SoftBank looks forward to the ecosystem partnership of uCPE which enable us to provide various features in SD-WAN service, in addition to the provision of Underlay/Overlay integration service that leverages our advantage as a carrier.”

During the press conference, Huawei also announced the deployment of an SD-WAN solution on Microsoft Azure. "As one of the leading global cloud providers, Microsoft Azure has a large number of enterprise customers. The integration of Huawei's SD-WAN with Azure will help enterprise customers quickly roll out enterprise interconnection networks, and enjoy the experience and performance made possible by cloud services," said Bob De Haven, General Manager of Microsoft Worldwide Communications and Media.

Huawei will be collaborating with Riverbed Technology to combine Riverbed SteelHead, an industry-leading solution for accelerated delivery of applications across the hybrid WAN, with Huawei's leading-edge solutions. The goal of the collaboration is to bring new services to market more quickly and address some of the most critical needs organizations are facing as they go digital and move to the cloud. Phil Harris, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Business Group at Riverbed Technology stated, "SteelHead speeds the performance of cloud applications by overcoming the combined challenges of bandwidth limitations and latency on the WAN. Our cooperation with Huawei will greatly improve the experience for end-users, accelerating digital performance and boosting enterprise productivity. "

Calvin Rowland, SVP of Business Development at F5 noted that "we have a longstanding history of cooperation with Huawei. With a common understanding of SD-WAN, we will work together to reshape the enterprise interconnection experience of carriers and their enterprise customers, and create more application services and security Value Added Services."

Carsten Rossenhoevel, Managing Director and Co-founder of EANTC, reported on the progress of SD-WAN testing, saying that "EANTC independently evaluates SD-WAN technology to help enterprises choose the right interconnection solutions. In 2017, we launched an SD-WAN testing program open to all SD-WAN vendors worldwide, to verify the market-readiness, performance, security, and manageability. Huawei's SD-WAN solution is the first that passed our strict testing, excelling in Scalability, Endpoint and Link Resiliency, as well as Performance Monitoring."

In addition to ecosystem cooperation, Huawei proposed a new delivery model similar to "cloud services" — the Huawei TelCloud-based "cloud platform enabling model". With this model, carrier customers can exploit the SD-WAN market rapidly and on demand, and with light assets, avoiding pain points encountered in the self-construction model such as heavy assets and slow ROI. This allows more carriers to participate in the construction of the industry chain.

Zhong Kaisheng, President of Huawei Switch & Enterprise Gateway Product Line, stated, "The ecosystem enables business success. Huawei is building a richer SD-WAN ecosystem for shared success. This has made SD-WAN solutions more competitive and pushed the industry forward. More importantly, the ecosystem can help carriers and enterprise customers build an Intent-Driven Network that delivers a better experience. In doing so, they can quickly go digital in the cloud era."