Wednesday Bytes: Windstream, FirstLight, Orange Business, Pensa

Here’s a couple of enterprise wins, and a couple of NFV developments to take a quick look at:

Windstream is adding some fiber to the diet of Olé Mexican Foods. They are hooking up the US’ largest tortilla manufacturer’s footprint with bigger bandwidth, replacing current T-1 connections with 250Mbps at the headquarters and data center and 50Mbps at remote sites. Also on the menu is a new UCaaS system. This feels like the kind of deal they had in mind with the EarthLink and Broadview acquisitions, serving IT infrastructure and connectivity in the mid-market.

FirstLight has also revealed up a mid-market enterprise win this week. Eyesight Ophthalmic Services has picked FirstLight for both internet and voice services, powering its cloud-based medical data systems. Eyesight Ophthalmic Services has three offices in the New Hampshire markets of Exeter, Portsmouth, and Somersworth and a call center that serves all three. Since moving to FirstLight they’ve experienced greater reliability during severe weather.

Orange Business Services has demoed the next stage of its SD-WAN capabilities. They recently showcased the first onboarding of a Cisco SD-WAN VNF on Cisco’s ENCS uCPE gear. They hope to use the technology to better serve enterprises looking to move to SD-WAN by replacing existing appliances at the customer premises with Cisco’s ENCS and thus provide automated SD-WANs based on Viptela technology at all sites.

And I learned of another NFV player yesterday. The automation software provider Pensa unveiled its Pensa Maestro NFV technology yesterday, following on the company’s launch in October. Pensa is taking aim at service providers looking to migrate from legacy appliance-based infrastructures to NFV-powered infrastructure and to do it with speed and less risk.

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Categories: Metro fiber · NFV · SDN · Unified Communications