Open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN achieved further validation from Telefónica via the telco's invstement arm, Wayra Germany.
In December, flexiWAN announced proof-of-concept trials with Telefónica, which was followed up by Monday's news that Wayra Germany has made a minority investement in flexiWAN. In Monday's press relase, Telefónica said its investment in flexiWAN, which took place in December, would enable it to differentiate its network services by integrating third-party applications over flexiWANs SD-WAN infrastructure.
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All of which will help Telefónica enhance its B2B value proposition in the SME segment, where customers require simpler connectivity solutions and lower total cost of ownership.
Telefónica and flexiWAN started their collaboration in June with a plan to run flexiWAN's open source, modular SD-WAN solution on white box customer premises equipment. This year's PoCs across Germany will test flexiWAN on customers' branches that need throughput from 50 Mbps to 1 Gig of encrypted traffic.
By including flexiWAN in its portfolio, Telefónica is enriching its CPE supply chain with lower cost x86 devices using open interfaces and software development kits, which in turn lower the cost of ownership for service providers and their customers.
As opposed to legacy vendor lock-in, using open source vendors such as flexiWAN allows Telefónica to offer and support modular components that are interchangeable in networks. Telefónica said Monday's announcement with flexiWAN was the first step in its overarching plans for this year.
“Our work with flexiWAN so far is the seed for more ambitious plans in the following months. We envision flexiWAN as the tech base to strengthen our B2B networking portfolio with differential products,” said Juan Campillo, connectivity innovation director at Telefónica.
FlexiWAN's software includes a centrally managed SD-WAN solution in open source that has integration points in the core of the systems that can integrate third-party logic from various companies.
By enabling third-party integration, flexiWAN can break vendor lock-in by creating an open source ecosystem with vendors that specialize in various areas such as deep packet inspection (DPI), security, WAN optimization, session border control, VoIP, and other traffic-specific optimization logic.
The core flexiWAN solution also can enable application-specific detection and optimization logic by software-as-a-service applications. It also can integrate with open source DevOps tools, and even with other SD-WAN vendors.
While the amount of the investment wasn't released, startup accelerator Wayra Germany typically makes small investments in companies.
“We are encouraged by this investment and view it as a sign of confidence in our strategy and capacity to execute in both technology and business domains, we thank the team at Wayra Germany and Telefónica for their support of our mission to democratize the SD-WAN market," said Amir Zmora, CEO and co-founder of flexiWAN, in a statement. “FlexiWAN continues to work globally with service providers, enterprises and system intergrators of all sizes in order to realize our mission. We join the call of Telefonica to these companies to join this journey.”