·      June 2019: Collaboration commenced

·      December 2019: Initial Wayra Germany minority investment in flexiWAN open SD-WAN

·      Represents Telefónica dedication to innovation of networking solutions

·      A series of customer PoC’s to be executed throughout 2020 in Germany

Munich - Wayra Germany, the corporate innovation hub and early stage investment arm of Telefónica, announced today that it has invested, as a minority shareholder, in flexiWAN.

The investment represents Telefónica’s continued commitment to collaborating actively in the innovation space to promote a more open B2B ecosystem, and importantly achieve innovation across networking solutions. This includes the intent to continue to promote, through its Wayra innovation hub, a wider and more diverse B2B ecosystem of players and startups. This new relationship with flexiWAN, a company who is fostering innovation and driving accelerated service enhancement, will positively impact important elements of our B2B value proposition.

Telefonica’s strategy aiming for differentiation

Leveraging flexiWAN’s modular architecture, Telefónica will be able to explore further differentiation of its network services by integrating new and 3rd party applications over flexiWAN´s SD-WAN infrastructure. This will help Telefónica  to initially enhance its B2B value proposition in the SME segment where customers require simpler connectivity solutions and lower TCO.

This movement is a step forward in Telefónica’s strategy to drive openness in all the network elements. The execution of this partnership will support the ability to build networks that can be assembled from interchangeable modular components.

See Telefónica’s investment in Open RAN vendor Altiostar

In this particular case, the open technology offered by flexiWAN can deliver several benefits not only to Telefónica but to the whole B2B networking ecosystem:

·      Enrich CPE supply chain with more manufacturers thanks to the x86 compatibility (and potentially other hardware architectures)

·      Open the B2B ecosystem to startups and long tail developers thanks to its open interfaces and SDK which facilitates the integration of other applications such as security and WAN accelerators.

·      Lower service provider and enterpriseTCO thanks to: enhanced service components, the democratization of the software defined networking and the related increase in deployment and innovation driving improved results and solutions.

By deploying flexiWAN, Telefónica is able to further enhance its position as an active player in the open community and reinforce its position across the enterprise networking value chain.

“Our work with flexiWAN so far is the seed for more ambitious plans in the following months. We envision flexiWAN as the tech base to strengthen our B2B networking portfolio with differential products,” said Juan Campillo, Connectivity Innovation Director at Telefónica.

“With this contribution, we want to support flexiWAN´s journey through Telefónica and also continue to ensure our global corporation remain close to the key technologies that will allow us to provide customized high-quality solutions to our customers. We believe, that flexiWAN has an experienced and strong team that will define the new standards in the open source SD-WAN space,”added Alberto Pérez Arranz, Head of Investments at Wayra Germany.

“We are encouraged by this investment and view it as a sign of confidence in our strategy and capacity to execute in both technology and business domains, we thank the team at Wayra Germany and Telefónica for their support of our mission to democratize the SD-WAN market.” Commented Amir Zmora, CEO and Co-founder of flexiWAN. “flexiWAN continues to work globally with service providers, enterprises and Sis of all sizes in order to realize our mission. We join the call of Telefonica to these companies to join this journey.”

Besides investing, Wayra Germany is working closely with the business units of Telefónica Germany to identify the best technologies and startups with whom we can collaborate in the future. The aim is to build the bridge between startups and the corporation, starting with PoCs and with the future potential opportunity to achieve a commercial relationship. The very best start-ups within our portfolios will have unparalleled access to our global network of over 350 million customers.

flexiWAN brings a new spirit to SD-WAN

flexiWAN is anIsraeli startup founded in 2018 and is on a mission to create the second wave of SD-WANs with an open source SD-WAN solution featuring a modular architecture. This unchains SD-WAN software from monolithic, vendor locked solutions. Offering SD-WAN open source is only one element in a broader strategy for flexiWAN to democratize the SD-WAN market, dramatically lowering barriers to entry for companies to adopt it or offer services based on the flexiWAN SD-WAN open source.

To learn more about flexiWAN’s unique approach to networking, visit www.flexiwan.com, and follow the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About wayra Germany
Wayra Germany is the open innovation hub of the telecommunications group Telefónica. As an early-stage-investment-arm, wayra scales technology-oriented start-ups and pursues a "venture client" model in which the parent company Telefónica acts as a customer for the start-ups' products. With the Wayra-as-a-Service program, the corporate venture provider supports Telefónica as well as other groups in their cooperation with young companies.

More information at https://de.wayra.co/ 

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