Yesterday, Huawei said it was working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology. The Chinese vendor said its SD-WAN would be orchestrated by HPE’s Service Director, using open APIs.
Today, HPE issued a short statement, saying Huawei’s announcement yesterday was inaccurate. “HPE does not have a partnership with Huawei to develop SD-WAN or any other technology for general market availability,” states HPE. “As a strong supporter of open standards and interfaces, HPE works together with all major vendors on customer-specific projects.”
Emmanuel Fyle, who handles crisis public relations and issues management for HPE, told SDxCentral that while HPE works with a lot of vendors — and he couldn’t comment on whether it works with Huawei — he said Huawei’s claim that it has a partnership with HPE is not true.
Huawei has gotten a lot of bad press in the United States lately. The company has been under fire from members of Congress as well as the Federal Communications Commission. These groups claim Huawei’s equipment poses a security risk.
SDxCentral reached out to Huawei’s U.S. headquarters in Plano, Texas. At deadline, the company had not responded to a request for comment on HPE’s statement. In addition, the phone for Huawei’s Washington, D.C. office has been disconnected, and an email inquiry to that office bounced back.
The New York Times reported last week that Huawei laid off five American employees. The only named employee was William Plummer, who had for seven years led Huawei’s outreach efforts in Washington, D.C. The newspaper took his departure as a signal that Huawei may be changing its tactics in terms of building its U.S. business.
Riverbed Technologies and F5 were also named by Huawei as companies it is partnering with for SD-WAN. A Riverbed spokesperson did confirm the accuracy of that. “Riverbed is working with Huawei,” she said.
F5 did not immediately reply to a request for commenet.