Amdocs, a provider of customer experience solutions, has enhanced network cloud offerings to help service providers transition from today’s physical networks to network cloud service environments.
The new offerings provide deployment-ready solutions that support hybrid physical/virtual networks as service providers begin to map out their virtualization strategies in accordance with ETSI network functions virtualization (NFV) standards.
“The offerings announced today are designed to help service providers transition to virtual networks via a scalable, software-driven, vendor-agnostic approach and AT&T’s announcement naming Amdocs to its User Defined Network Cloud supplier program is further endorsement of this approach,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing.
Amdocs Network Cloud Service Orchestrator is an open, vendor-agnostic, catalog-driven solution that enables service providers to define and activate complex services containing virtual network functions (VNFs) from multiple vendors in a matter of days instead of months, the company said.
The solution enables the continuous design, fulfillment and assurance of network services, from any VNF vendor, utilizing existing service catalog and ordering systems, over all mainstream cloud management systems and software defined network (SDN) Controllers in a hybrid physical and virtual environment.
Amdocs also announced NFV Service Partner Program that is focused on pre-integrating a rich set of VNFs and NFV infrastructure elements in order to simplify the complexity of service orchestration, improve service time-to-market, and address end-to-end Service Level Agreement considerations.
The program currently has 21 partners including Juniper Networks, Metaswitch Networks, Red Hat and Connectum.
Amdocs’ range of VNF products include Amdocs Policy Controller, the industry’s first Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) to fully align with ETSI’s NFV ISG blueprint architecture for management and orchestration.
The Amdocs Policy Controller VNF enables service providers to rapidly introduce highly tuned data offers for performance-critical services such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and customized market applications, including virtual packet core for enterprise.
The Policy Controller is supported by a new orchestration-ready element manager that provides a single point of configuration and management across cloud and bare-metal environments, offering service providers a future-proof solution as they invest in virtualized architectures.
Analysts believe Amdocs Network Cloud Orchestrator will set a new trend with important features for next generation network operations, including support for hybrid (physical and virtual) network management through its catalog-driven approach as well as NFV service orchestration capabilities that talk to industry-standard virtualized infrastructure managers (VIMs).
Other factors like Amdocs’ support for openness – allowing co-existence with third-party OSS, VIMs and NFV infrastructures – also address the requirements from operators.
