BARCELONA -- MWC 2018 -- TPx Communications is giving its managed SD-WAN service a facelift with new partner Silver Peak in an effort to expand the service internationally and to larger enterprises.

TPx Communications Vice President Jared Martin says while the managed service provider (MSP) has been satisfied with its existing SD-WAN platform built with VeloCloud, the new partnership will provide TPx with the capability to meet demand from its channel partners that have specifically requested Silver Peak Systems Inc. 's SD-WAN service. In addition, the Silver Peak service will extend TPx Communications' SD-WAN platform to customers with over 50 sites, as well as US-based customers that have international sites. (See Silver Peak & TPx Communications Hook Up for Managed SD-WAN.)

"We see [Silver Peak] as the evolution of what we're doing," says Martin. "We intend to keep VeloCloud, which has the use cases it solves, but as we continue to move this and go more up market in terms of the number of sites and multinational companies, we needed another partner to help us."

Currently TPx has over 3,500 endpoints deployed with its current SD-WAN service with VeloCloud. In addition to meeting the needs of multinational enterprises with over 50 sites, Martin says the Silver Peak platform will better suit customers with more complex networks and complex routing protocols, higher WAN optimization requirements and virtual security requirements.

In the second quarter of 2018, TPx is planning to deploy universal CPEs with the Silver Peak SD-WAN service as a virtual network function (VNF), continues Martin. Nav Chander Silver Peak's senior director of service provider marketing, explains that up to four VNFs can be deployed on a white box including SD-WAN, WAN optimization, routing and a stateful firewall.

Learn how to tackle the challenge of wide-scale SD-WAN rollouts at the fifth annual Big Communications Event in Austin, May 14-16. The event is free for communications
service providers!

At MWC, Silver Peak will be demonstrating the ability to provide SD-WAN with 4G LTE and dual LTE underlay connections with partner BEC Technology, which Chander says is certified with multiple mobile carriers. TPx's Martin says the MSP will be leveraging this capability as they expand internationally and provide off-network customers with SD-WAN via LTE.

"That's a big one -- the 4G LTE, because we have our primary use case that we've deployed here in the US where we provide unlimited 4G LTE data as the primary connection for our customers, so we want to expand on that looking to other markets outside of the US," says Martin. "At the end of the day, there are better mobile networks in the world than what we have in this country and that will help us remove boundaries and rapidly deploy services where we won't have to leverage traditional connectivity options."

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading