MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Nuage Networks, the Nokia venture focused on software-defined networks (SDN), is continuing its strong push in the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) market thanks to recent contracts with several of the world's largest service providers including BT, China Telecom, Telefonica, and Telia. Today, TELUS announced that it has joined forces with Nuage Networks to launch TELUS Network as a Service (NaaS), an innovative new SD-WAN solution that enables businesses to virtually build, manage and cloud-optimize their networks quickly, easily and costeffectively through a flexible self-serve platform.

Nuage Networks SD-WAN solution, Virtualized Network Services (VNS), is increasingly the choice of global carriers and enterprises looking to automate and optimize their WAN environments and IT processes. Nuage Networks SD-WAN reduces costs, increases business agility and provides the massive scalability needed to meet cloud-driven requirements and surging data-driven demand.

SD-WAN exploded onto the enterprise space just over a year ago, and has grown quickly due to the tangible returns gained by relying on software to automate IT, optimize network traffic, accelerate VPN deployments and reduce WAN overhead. According to market research firm IDC, by the end of 2017 about 70 percent of enterprise customers responding to a global survey said that they will have evaluated or deployed SD-WAN. In addition, over 40 percent of enterprise respondents to a recent IDC survey indicated that they plan to implement integrated SD-WAN solutions obtained from communications service providers. Overall, IDC estimates that the SD-WAN products and services market will be worth more than US$6 billion in 2020, up from about $575 million in 2016.

Brad Casemore, research director of datacenter networks at IDC, said: "The cloud is a critical enabler of business agility and digital transformation, and enterprise IT teams are quickly recognizing their WAN services and architectures also require significant transformation. Many of these enterprise customers are looking to their service providers to deliver SD-WAN solutions that can confer benefits such as cost-effective, feature-rich, secure application delivery and operational savings at branch offices and other remote sites. Nuage Networks, in conjunction with its growing roster of service-provider partners, is responding to this enterprise demand, which IDC believes will remain robust for the next several years."

Sunil Khandekar, Nuage Networks CEO and founder, said: "Nuage Networks has become a leader in helping service providers deliver fully automated and self-service SD-WAN solutions to enterprise customers who are looking to connect their users quickly and securely to applications in private and public clouds. Our platform is present in the world's largest carrier-grade networks and is being deployed as a complete overlay that can serve as a natural extension of customers' existing L2 and L3 MPLS VPN and other WAN service offerings to remote sites. We are the only vendor that offers a single SDN automation platform for the datacenter, WAN and public cloud - providing operational simplification, agility and significant cost savings across the multiple cloud-based services currently offered by these providers."

Nuage Networks