Two hardware vendors this week unveiled products to bring commodity switching and network functions virtualization (NFV) to enterprises through service providers.

Bare metal switch supplier Pica8 this week rolled out a Power-over-Ethernet switches to be sold into enterprises by service providers as managed service customer premises equipment (CPE). And Ciena announced availability of the 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, an Ethernet CPE platform with virtualized network function (VNF) integration.

PoE CPE Pica8

The offerings address a desire by service providers, like AT&T, to sell bare metal white box switches into the customer premises for cost, flexibility, performance and SDN programmability advantages, and to offer service as VNFs on that hardware. Pica8 says this market – bare metal as CPE – is six months old and that this week’s PoE offerings are merely the latest in an existing CPE portfolio to onboard enterprises to the cloud.

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