KDDI Europe, a London-based subsidiary of the Japanese telco KDDI Corporation, is partnering with Silver Peak to offer managed SD-WAN services for its 500 enterprise customers.

The majority of KDDI Europe's enterprise customers are midsized and large global companies with 100 sites or more, primarily in the automotive, manufacturing, financial and pharmaceutical industries. Dr. Nick Polydorou, deputy director and head of KDDI Pan Euro Networks, says KDDI Europe operates fairly autonomously from KDDI Corp. in terms of day-to-day operations and product selection, which is why the subsidiary was able to select its own SD-WAN supplier. KDDI Corporation has previously announced SD-WAN partnerships with suppliers such as Versa Networks and Aryaka . (See Silver Peak & KDDI Europe Combine on SD-WAN Services, KDDI Embraces Versa's SD-WAN and Aryaka Launches Clientless SD-WAN for Remote Access.)

"We have a strong routing stack so if you have a core MPLS service from KDDI, broadband, LTE or some other service, we can connect to it easily … peer to SD-WAN and non-SD-WAN sites," says Shayne Stubbs, vice president of service provider and cloud for Silver Peak Systems Inc. "So for this large enterprise space that's obviously not going to roll out infrastructure overnight, it gives them an easy way to leg in and grow from there."

KDDI Europe's Polydorou says the total cost of ownership (TCO) was an important consideration in selecting Silver Peak, which he says is 50% cheaper than another undisclosed SD-WAN service the operator was considering during the selection process. KDDI Europe's SD-WAN service will initially be available for customer deployment via Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnect devices.

"Silver Peak was the ultimate chosen partner for us because it fit the Lego bricks approach to building a service, we wanted something that would easily fit on top of something else … so our customers didn't have to move away from their traditional, existing network provisions," says Polydorou. "We could literally overlay the SD-WAN element on top of their existing services."

Initially, KDDI Europe sought to provide more WAN optimization services to customers, but Polydorou says the operator ultimately broadened its product search and chose a combination of WAN optimization and SD-WAN services through Silver Peak. In addition to SD-WAN and WAN optimization capabilities, the EdgeConnect devices provide a number of other features important to KDDI Europe's customers, including stateful firewall and encryption, says Polydorou.

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Silver Peak's Stubbs says the partnership with KDDI Europe is a significant move for the supplier as it strengthens Silver Peak's presence outside of North America into Europe. In February at Mobile World Congress, Silver Peak announced an SD-WAN partnership with TPx Communications, a managed service provider headquartered in Los Angeles with 80,000 customer locations across the US. (See TPx Takes SD-WAN International With Silver Peak and Silver Peak Powers TPx Expansion of SD-WAN Services.)

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading