BRISBANE, Australia -- Megaport Limited (ASX: MP1) ("Megaport"), a global leading Network as a Service (NaaS) provider, today announces the upcoming release of Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE), a product innovation that will enable the hosting of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), such as SD-WAN capabilities, directly on Megaport's global Software Defined Network (SDN). With MVE, customers will tap into Megaport's extensive platform reach to deploy and extend their network functions closer to the edge, in real time, and without the need to deploy hardware. Megaport and Cisco are collaborating to enable Cisco SD-WAN as the first use case on MVE.

"As enterprises and service providers begin to fully understand the benefits of SD-WAN, the ability for Megaport customers to easily, and in minutes, 'spin up' SD-WAN virtual appliances around the world on our platform is a big enabler for global organisations," said Vincent English, CEO of Megaport. "Having these virtual appliances fully integrated into the Megaport Interconnection Platform leveraging our multicloud connectivity takes this to another level."

The highly-distributed MVE footprint will align with global centres of commerce to support traffic localisation for low-latency networking and will provide an interconnection gateway to securely manage multicloud and multi-location interconnection. MVE includes gateway functionality to connect with Megaport's SDN in a platform-neutral and technology-agnostic manner, allowing customers to move beyond legacy networking models and take a unified approach to managing their network.

SD-WAN on MVE

SD-WAN, the first network use case supported on MVE, enables customers to take advantage of Megaport's secure, on-demand network from any internet-connected SD-WAN location around the world. This empowers customers to build a unified, multicloud network architecture that scales as their business needs grow — in a matter of minutes.

Customers will host and fully manage instances of SD-WAN devices on MVE to connect Megaport's global interconnection fabric with SD-WAN enabled locations. Setup and maintenance of SD-WAN instances is enabled through an API and soon will be available through Megaport's point-and-click portal. Once connected, SD-WAN enabled locations can provision on demand connections to Megaport's leading ecosystem of cloud, IT service providers, and more than 700 enabled data centres.

Megaport is integrated with more than 200 cloud onramps — the most of any neutral elastic interconnection platform —  and has an ecosystem of over 360 service providers including Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Salesforce, among others. MVE unlocks the power of Megaport's ecosystem and makes it available regardless of location.

The Megaport SDN provides carrier-grade, private connectivity that scales and secures traffic to vital locations and service providers to address performance and security requirements for mission critical applications. More than 1850 customers rely on Megaport to power their digital businesses.

SD-WAN on MVE Highlights:

• IP-enabled connections to Megaport's industry-first elastic interconnection platform.
• Bring your own SD-WAN license.
• Highly-distributed for localised connections.
• Point-and-click network provisioning to support interconnection between branch locations, data centres, cloud providers, and IT services.
• Real-time provisioning of virtual network infrastructure and interconnections.
• No hardware to ship, install, or manage.
• Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) consumption model.
• Unified end-to-end network provisioning and management to transform legacy networks.
• Secure, multicloud connections to more than 360 service providers and 700+ enabled data centres.

Cisco SD-WAN Collaboration

Megaport and Cisco have an initiative to integrate Megaport Virtual Edge with Cisco's secure SD-WAN, powered by Viptela, to enable interoperation of Megaport's SDN and Cisco's SD-WAN fabric technology. Megaport and Cisco have invited a select list of customers to participate in the MVE beta program. General availability of the Cisco SD-WAN platform on MVE is planned for the first quarter of 2021.

"The development of Megaport Virtual Edge marks a transformation point for Megaport," said Bevan Slattery, Founder and Chairman of Megaport. "By creating a platform that will bridge various network access types directly to Megaport's SDN, we have effectively made it possible to connect to our leading ecosystem of service providers and data centres from anywhere in the world. This will put the power of elastic interconnection in the hands of more businesses around the globe. We are excited to work with Cisco to integrate their SD-WAN services on MVE so customers can gain full control over how they connect to the vital services that power their business."