Alcatel-Lucent continues to beat the drum for software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), with the creation of an open ecosystem for service providers, developers and vendors interested in adopting NFV.
The CloudBand Ecosystem Program was initially rolled out to a limited group of vendors, but Alcatel-Lucent has now opened it to include a wider array of businesses, and 15 companies are now signed on. Some of those include Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Citrix, Intel, Vyatta, Radware, Red Hat, HP, Gigaspaces, StackIQ, Inktank and Nominum.
Another member is Nuage Networks, Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN-focused venture that was launched earlier this year.
“As an industry we need to accelerate the journey towards NFV,” said Axel Clauberg, VP of IP and fixed access architecture on the group CTO team for Deutsche Telekom. He added that there are two necessary pieces for that to happen: a “wide array of best of breed ‘virtual network functions’ that currently run on purpose built hardware” and “an NFV cloud platform that’s optimized to run these functions at scale.
“We’re happy to see Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand open up their NFV platform for any company developing virtual network functions to help accelerate this journey,” Clauberg added.
NFV is supposed to help telecom operators become more flexible in their network architectures and ability to quickly add and scale services, plus reduce costs through the ability to run network functions on readily available commercial hardware rather than something purpose-built and more expensive.
Alcatel-Lucent hopes to accelerate the development and adoption of NFV by opening access to its CloudBand solution, allowing developers and vendors to access tools and test apps within a simulated cloud environment before putting them on a service provider’s network, plus access to a knowledge center, discussion forums and showcase of demos and use cases to allow members to learn from one another and keep up on developments. ALU already uses the platform for its own virtualized applications for the carrier cloud.
“Alcatel-Lucent is dedicated to helping service providers advance quickly in the area of NFV. The CloudBand Ecosystem Program aims to do just that, providing a workspace where companies can access CloudBand and collaborate and learn from each other. This will help service providers adopt a completely new NFV operational model using services and solutions that have been developed with them and their customers’ needs in mind,” said Roy Amir, VP of strategy and ecosytem for CloudBand at Alcatel-Lucent.
Investors reacted positively to the news, sending Alcatel-Lucent’s stock up 6% in morning trading.
“Realising the NFV promise is not a task for a single vendor,” said Dr. Diego Lopez, head of technology exploration for Telefonica I+D. “It is not only that NFV addresses so many domains that no vendor can realistically aim to deliver in all of them, but the fact that the NFV promise itself involves an open innovation ecosystem, implying true industry and market collaboration. By creating the first open ecosystem program around the CloudBand NFV platform, Alcatel-Lucent is making a crucial contribution to accelerate the realisation of NFV.”
“Our research with service providers has found strong demand for an open ecosystem of NFV vendors, large and small, which will work together to resolve NFV challenges and facilitate adoption,” said Caroline Chappell, senior analyst with Heavy Reading. “NFV is not just about virtualizing network functions themselves, but also about managing them and orchestrating the cloud resources that support them to optimize their performance at lowest cost. This requires a high degree of collaboration and ongoing knowledge exchange between NFV stakeholders, especially at this early stage of the market. Alcatel-Lucent’s decision to lead such an ecosystem is a welcome development and will go a long way towards reassuring service providers that the NFV piece parts they select from ecosystem members will work together in future.”
For a recent RCR conversation with ABI Research’s Sam Rosen on the impact of NFV on content delivery networks (CDN), click here.
