Windstream made two interesting announcements in the enterprise space yesterday. One was a high profile contract win with the Green Bay Packers, and the other featured the addition of SD-WAN to their product set.
The Green Bay Packers have picked Windstream for a suite of data services. Windstream will be hooking up Lambeau Field with fiber and Gigabit Ethernet as well as the team’s business office a few miles away. Over that infrastructure Windstream will also be providing voice, IP, and business continuity services. Interestingly, the Packers face the Atlanta Falcons this weekend with a trip to the SuperBowl at stake, but the Falcons also happen to be Windstream’s other NFL franchise customer.
But the announcement from yesterday that has perhaps the longer term implications is Windstream’s rollout of SD-WAN services. They’ve deployed VeloCloud’s SDN-powered WAN offering, and will be taking it to the enterprise market. Among their early customers is the Kona Grill restaurant chain. The arrival of SD-WAN is promising to change the face of enterprise networking, putting many of the benefits of SDN directly into the hands of enterprise networks. VeloCloud’s implementation is one of the more popular ones at the moment, and Windstream is clearly looking to leverage it to claim some territory.
Windstream is also in the midst of the acquisition of EarthLink, and it happens that EarthLink also has a VeloCloud-powered SD-WAN offering it introduced last summer. That’s at least one thing that should be ready to integrate on day one I suspect.
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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · SDN
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To bad their network didn’t help the Packers play better yesterday!!!