Telecom equipment major Alcatel-Lucent announced CloudBand Ecosystem Program.
The new initiative is to advance industry adoption of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Alcatel-Lucent said on Tuesday.
CloudBand Ecosystem Program will be the first open community of service providers, developers and vendors adopting NFV.
By accelerating service provider transition to NFV, Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem Program will enable new carrier cloud business models. This will be achieved by opening up access to Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand.
Alcatel-Lucent said that developers and vendors can access tools and test applications to ensure they scale and interact within a simulated cloud environment before they reach a service provider’s network. Alcatel-Lucent already uses the platform at its CloudBand Innovation Center (CIC) to successfully ‘onboard’ its own virtualized applications for the carrier cloud.
“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,” said Diego R Lopez, head of Technology Exploration Telefónica I+D.
CloudBand Ecosystem Program members can also access a knowledge center, a forum for discussions and a showcase area with demos and use cases. This will allow members to learn from each other while keeping up to date with the latest industry developments.
“As an industry we need to accelerate the journey towards NFV. There are 2 main parts in making this happen that need to work well with each other through experimentation and iterations: 1. Wide array of best of breed ‘virtual network functions’ that currently run on purpose built HW and 2. An NFV cloud Platform that’s optimized to run these functions at scale,” said Axel Clauberg, VP IP and Fixed Access Architecture, Group CTO team, Deutsche Telekom.
Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes will outline how The Shift Plan will leverage new technologies to accelerate the move to the cloud by service providers. Speaking at the opening of Alcatel-Lucent’s cloud research and development center near Tel Aviv, Combes will explain the role cloud is playing in IP Networking and Ultra-Broadband Access.
