Enterprises are consuming more business-critical cloud applications, and most connect to the cloud over the Internet. However, the Internet offers only best-effort connectivity with inconsistent network quality, which can impact application performance significantly.

Enterprises can also choose direct cloud interconnects for their site-to-cloud connectivity. However these "mid-mile" interconnects require customers to plan for capacity and global reach upfront, which can lead to underutilization and spiraling cost.

Today we are announcing a collaboration with Megaport, which offers Software-Defined Cloud Interconnects (SDCI). It provides programmable cloud interconnects to bridge enterprise SD-WAN sites to clouds in minutes instead of weeks, with strong performance and high reliability.

Cisco's vManage will act as the overlay for software-defined cloud interconnects, providing ease of management and the capability to rapidly instantiate connections.

This collaboration will offer Cisco's SD-WAN customers access to Megaport's global reach. Megaport offers extensive connectivity choices, backed by service-level guarantees for assurance. It includes peering with location data centers, with a global footprint across 23 countries. Megaport connects to more than 200 cloud on-ramps, including leading SaaS services like Office365 and Salesforce, and to the six largest public cloud providers:  AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba. The Megaport ecosystem also connects to 200 network service providers, more than 700 data centers, and 360 IT service providers and aaS providers.

With this new collaboration, Cisco customers can leverage Cisco's SD-WAN management platform, vManage, tosoftware-definetheir cloud interconnects to multicloud and SaaS. With this integration, Cisco SD-WAN fabric will act as the overlay, and the Megaport Software Defined Network will act as the underlay.

This collaboration extends Cisco's SD-WAN leadership, by offering an ecosystem platform for partners, of which Megaport is the first, to bridge Cisco SD-WAN fabric with the carrier-neutral and software-defined cloud interconnect fabrics.

Learn more about Cisco SD-WAN solutions.