Alcatel-Lucent announced the formation of the CloudBand Ecosystem Program, an open community of service providers, developers and vendors adopting Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) technology.
Alcatel-Lucent said NFV technology promises to bring the agility, efficiency and economics of the cloud to service provider networks and business operations, allowing operators to offer cloud services with the performance and reliability that consumers and enterprises expect. Virtualizing network functions allows faster and more efficient deployment where they are needed. In addition, service life-cycles can be more easily managed to meet dynamic customer demands without the huge investments in time, costs and power that are currently required.
Following a limited rollout with a small group of vendors, Alcatel-Lucent has now opened up the CloudBand EcoSystem Program to a wider circle of businesses, with 15 companies – including Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Citrix, Intel, Vyatta, Radware, Red Hat, HP, Nuage Networks, Gigaspaces, StackIQ, Inktank and Nominum signed up.
Axel Clauberg, VP IP and Fixed Access Architecture, Group CTO team, Deutsche Telekom AG, said: "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. 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."
Roy Amir, Vice President, Strategy & Ecosystem, CloudBand, Alcatel-Lucent, said: "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."
