18 July 2019

Orange Business Services (OBS) and Cisco have built on their joint SD-WAN co-innovation programme by coming together again to take on SD-LAN.

The pair will tailor software-defined local area network (SD-LAN) in Orange’s Open Labs program.

Using a mix of physical and virtual resources, Open Labs addresses customers’ business challenges and use cases by using network automation, analytics and security.

The French telecom giant said that by helping customers with their SD-WAN deployments, 80% of the enterprises that took part in Open Labs for an SD-WAN proof of concept then signed up to SD-WAN pilots with OBS. “From speaking to businesses in the UK, we’re hearing about the many ways they want to innovate in an increasingly connected world,” Richard Kitney - hybrid connectivity specialist at OBS told Networking+.

There’s a growing number of devices connected to LANs and fixed and wireless IP data traffic is growing rapidly. We have seen significant take up in our Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) offerings, and this same functionality can be delivered in the Local Area Network (SD-LAN).

This means ubiquitous visibility and control and business policy based networking across the whole environment” Kitney added that the partnership was helping to create a co-innovation approach that will help businesses “to unlock the power of new network technology so that they will no longer be held back by the cost” and complexity that they might currently be experiencing.