Altice USA is broadening its SD-WAN horizon by tapping into Cisco's Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) platform.
Cisco MSX is a multi-tenant, multi-service, cloud-native, service creation and delivery platform that helps service providers quickly and cost-effectively develop and deliver managed services to their business customers. While Cisco has several flavors of SD-WAN solutions, Altice USA is using Cisco's Viptela multi-tenant service.
Using MSX, Altice USA can offer its enterprise customers a host of differentiated services. Altice's business customers can have their managed services turned up quickly, managed securely from the cloud and modified easily using software-defined networking (SDN) technology. Down the road, MSX will enable Altice to provide a new set of infrastructure and platform services.
"We share Altice USA's focus on driving innovation and challenging the traditional way of doing things," said Cisco's Kip Compton, senior vice president, cloud platform and solutions group, in a statement. "We also share its obsession with understanding and pleasing the customer. With Cisco MSX, Altice USA can enable faster innovation and increase customer satisfaction by speeding time-to-market for SD-WAN, and other managed and on-demand services.”
Large cable operators were a bit slow out of the starter blocks in terms of deploying SD-WAN, but in addition to Altice, Comcast, Charter's Spectrum and Cox Business have SD-WAN offerings.
In March, Spectrum Enterprise announced its SD-WAN service, which it's serving up from its SDN/NFV and edge compute platform.
RELATED: Charter's Spectrum Enterprise launches SD-WAN using its NFV and edge platform
Charter's Managed SD-WAN service is available nationally and not just within its own cable footprint. Connectivity options for the SD-WAN service include "bring your own connection," fiber, HFC, LTE, and, eventually, wireless.
Spectrum Enterprise is also offering a security feature through Fortinet as part of its SD-WAN news. Both the SD-WAN and security services are offered as virtual network functions (VNFs) with more VNFs to follow this year.
In April, Comcast began offering managed routers on its ActiveCore platform. Both the managed router and SD-WAN services are offered as virtual network functions (VNF) on ActiveCore. Comcast first launched its SD-WAN service two years ago.
Comcast Business is using Versa Networks to help build ActiveCore as its software-defined networking (SDN) platform for its services and applications. Comcast for several years has touted ActiveCore as one of the first cable-delivered, gigabit-ready SDN platforms in the cable industry.
Last year Cox Business announced it bought hybrid cloud service provider RapidScale, which offered backup, recovery, security, mail services and desktop services, to beef up its SD-WAN platform.
In April of last year, RapidScale partnered with Citrix to offer a standalone managed SD-WAN service, which is called Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN. In addition to selling the service to its customers, RapidScale made NetScaler available for resale through its network of independent agents.