Alcatel-Lucent has opened a new network facility in Tokyo designed to give service providers and enterprise customers hands-on experience in the co-creation of new ultra-broadband and cloud-based services and applications.
The new Customer Network Center (CNC) has been created to make networking trends, most notably the trend towards cloud-based networking, tangible for customers. In the CNC, Alcatel-Lucent customers can participate in interactive demonstrations and co-creation opportunities that lead to the creation of new business models.
With 51 million LTE subscribers, Japan represents the world’s second largest market for LTE growth after the United States. Japan has been a pioneer in ultra-broadband access, mobile and cloud technologies and services, and has a history of fostering ecosystems that allows the highly innovative collaboration, Alcatel-Lucent said.
Among the platforms in the center are Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBandTM NFV technology and Nuage Networks, Alcatel-Lucent’s ‘in-house start-up’ venture focused on SDN solutions that applies advanced levels of programmability and automation to the cloud-optimized network.
Nicolas Bouverot, president, Alcatel-Lucent Japan, said, “The mission of the Japan Customer Network Center is to support in an extremely collaborative manner and develop concrete customer projects involving solutions that can be rolled out using the latest innovations and cloud networks.”
“Customers will be able to ask all the questions necessary to gain understanding at each of the four stages of decision making from early customer engagement, to requirement specification, through Proof of Concept, and finally, preparation for production release,” Bouverot added. “The CNC brings ultra-broadband communications, the cloud, and the customer together.”
Customer Network Center in Tokyo will extend Alcatel-Lucent’s Central NFV Competency Center in Naperville, near Chicago in the United States, providing remote access via the cloud in Tokyo.
This will allow for demos and interoperability testing of virtualized solutions over the CloudBand NFV platform to support Alcatel-Lucent’s Japan NFV/Network Transformation initiative which is already under way in Japan.
