Verizon Leverages VMware for New SD-WAN Initiative

March 01, 2022

Verizon Business added VMware to the global managed Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD WAN) service portfolio contained within Verizon’s Managed WAN Service. This new solution, built for cloud-ready global enterprises, bolsters Verizon’s partner ecosystem in delivering managed SD WAN services as part of its Network as a Service (NaaS) strategy.

“These last two years, we’ve seen massive adoption of managed SD WAN transformation of the WAN edge” said Massimo Peselli, Senior Vice President, Global Enterprise, Verizon Business. “This new VMware managed service solution increases optionality for customers seeking centralized intelligence and efficiencies at the WAN edge and is yet another example of Verizon Business partnering to offer best of breed solutions that help our customer’s transformation needs.”

As users and applications become even more distributed, the wide area network (WAN) can be complex to deploy, lacking flexibility, which as a result, becomes a bottleneck to delivering a consistent user experience. Verizon’s managed services is the network evolution that addresses the changing needs of global enterprise customers. Verizon’s Managed SD WAN addresses these challenges and limitations and is designed for today’s cloud-first enterprises. It enables the seamless connection of users to apps across multiple infrastructures, offering a consistent user experience regardless of device and transport type. It provides bandwidth efficiency which controls costs, rapid deployment with simplified operations, performance improvements and is flexible and extensible for better business agility with the ability to support large-scale global customers.

VMware SD-WAN, a part of VMware SASE is built around utilizing the cloud as a primary resource for customer applications, and the solution structure features three primary components:

SD WAN centralized orchestration: The VMware Orchestrator is a centralized orchestration platform that offers centralized policy, monitoring, reporting and analytics via the Verizon Enterprise Center.

SD WAN Gateways with controllers: VMware Gateways are points of presence (PoPs) located throughout the world that enable customer edge devices to optimize latency for management and control plane traffic.

VMware SD WAN Edge: Verizon deploys VMware Edge devices at a customer’s site and then programs the orchestrators with the appropriate policies to push out to those edge devices to facilitate SD WAN application routing.

Craig Connors, vice president and general manager of VMware’s SASE business, said, “The next generation of modern apps will run at the edge and enterprises must modernize their underlying network to support them. VMware SD-WAN, a part of our broader SASE platform, provides a more reliable and secure connection between the enterprise network and modern apps, ultimately improving end-user experience. By adding this solution to its SD WAN portfolio, Verizon is streamlining its enterprise customers’ transition to the edge.”