Verizon Business adds VMware SD-WAN to its managed services

Verizon Business has added VMware to its global managed-SD-WAN portfolio as part of its Network as a Service (NaaS) strategy. Verizon made the announcement at the Mobile World Conference event in Barcelona.

Verizon’s Managed SD-WAN is designed for hybrid-cloud environments and uses application-aware routing to make sure customer data takes the right path to its destination. This allows customers to use their private network for demanding, latency-sensitive apps while sending less critical data over public networks.

VMware SD-WAN features orchestration around centralized policy, monitoring, reporting, and analytics via Verizon Enterprise Center. It also offers SD WAN gateways with controllers. VMware Gateways are points of presencelocated around the world to provide physically close, low-latency connectivity to customer edge devices.

Verizon says it will deploy VMware SD-WAN Edge to set routing policies that the orchestrators push to edge devices.

“The next generation of modern apps will run at the edge and enterprises must modernize their underlying network to support them … By adding this solution to its SD-WAN portfolio, Verizon is streamlining its enterprise customers’ transition to the edge,” Craig Connors, vice president and general manager of VMware’s SASE business, said in a statement.

VMware has offered SD-WAN as part of its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) package since 2020. Last year it announced partnerships with Versa and Zscaler. For its part, Verizon also has SD-WAN agreements with Cisco and Fortinet. And Verizon isn’t the only legacy carrier pushing into SASE and SD-WAN. Last summer, Comcast bought out leading SD-WAN provider Masergy, which gave Comcast a big boost in the market.