BT Taps Cisco Tech for Managed SD-WAN Service

Communications firm BT has tapped Cisco technology to power a new global SD-WAN managed service.SD-WAN is a high-growth segment of the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) arena, simplifying the management and operation of a wide-area network (WAN) by decoupling the networking hardware from its control mechanism. Combined with BT's network orchestration capabilities, the managed service is designed to help firms optimize network traffic while balancing performance and cost, BT said in an announcement last week. BT Connect Cisco SD-WAN is powered by SD-WAN (Viptela), a centrally managed, cloud-hosted and software-defined overlay service for complex enterprise networks, based on technology (Viptela) that Cisco acquired last year.