Friday, December 5, 2014

Ericsson Signs 7-Year Nationwide Manage Services Deal with India's Reliance

Ericsson has signed a seven-year deal Reliance Communications to operate and manage their wireline and wireless networks across India. Ericsson will also take over responsibility for the field maintenance, network operations and operational planning of Reliance Communications' 2G, CDMA and 3G mobile networks. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Reliance Communications' infrastructure covers over 150,000 km of fiber, 2G/3G/CDMA mobile network, wireline access and enterprise network in 22 telecom circles, across India and includes 21,000 towns and 400,000 villages to which it offers converged services including voice, data and video.

Ericsson said the agreement extends its managed services footprint nationwide across all the 22 circles in India. This is the first pan-Indian managed services deal for Ericsson.

Ericsson will streamline Reliance Communication's operations by bringing all aspects of fiber, mobile networks and wireline access networks to Reliance Communications' wireless and Global Enterprise Business, across differentiated product lines.

"We are happy to announce our partnership with Ericsson to manage our wireline and wireless network on a pan-Indian basis.  Given the complexity of networks and the growing performance expectations from customers, we are banking on the experience, innovation and technical expertise of Ericsson to improve the productivity of our network and ensure customer satisfaction and retention by delivering superior network performance and service quality at optimized costs," stated Suresh Rangachar, Head of Commercial, Reliance Communications.

Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President and Head of Business Unit Global Services, Ericsson, said; "We are excited to partner with Reliance Communications for this strategic multi-technology managed services deal. We have been managing their networks in north and west and are now pleased to extend this support to all 22 Circles.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1877570

  • In February 2013, Reliance Communications awarded an eight-year, managed services contract to Ericsson valued at US$1 billion to operate and manage wireline and wireless networks in the Northern and Western states of India.  Under this deal, Ericsson will manage the day to day operations across wireline and wireless networks and will take over responsibility for field maintenance, network operations and operational planning of Reliance Communications 2G, CDMA and 3G mobile networks.
  • In July 2014, Ericsson opened a Global Network Operations Center in Kolkata, India -- its fourth such facility in the nation.  It also operates NOCs in Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore.  The new Global Network Operations Center provides managed services that help operators in 49 countries around the world reduce capital expenditure, improve network performance and promote end-user loyalty. The managed services provided include service and resource fulfillment, proactive and reactive maintenance, alarm and network fault handling, restoration and repair of network faults, problem management and change management, customer problem management, help desks, network planning, design and optimization, application development and support, and operations management.

UK's Network Rail Deploys Infinera DTN-X

Telefónica UK, announced the deployment of the Infinera DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform across Network Rail’s railway infrastructure in the UK.

Network Rail owns, manages and develops Britain’s railway – the 20,000 miles of track, 40,000 bridges and viaducts, and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations (the largest of which we also run).

Infinera said NRT is using the platform's "Instant Bandwidth" technology to deploy capacity with the click of a mouse. The DTN-X is designed to scale in the future to support up to 12 Tbps of integrated OTN switching as well as Fast Shared Mesh Protection to provide rapid service protection even in the face of multiple fiber cuts.

http://www.infinera.com/j7/servlet/NewsItem?newsItemID=433

Infonetics: LTE-A and Small Cells Driver Microwave Equipment Sales

The worldwide microwave equipment market hit $1.1 billion in 3Q2014, up 4% sequentially, though down 2% from a year ago, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.

"So far this year, the microwave equipment market has been in a revenue dip, trending downward due to pricing pressures and intertechnology competition with wireline backhaul alternatives. But now the combination of LTE-A upgrades and modest growth in small cell deployments is giving the market a small injection of energy," notes Richard Webb, directing analyst for mobile backhaul and small cells at Infonetics Research.  "Several vendors saw improved quarter-over-quarter results in the third quarter, and we expect the microwave equipment market to inch up in 2015."

Some highlights:

  • Backhaul continues to dominate the microwave market, while access and transport remain stable niche segments
  • The EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) leads the world in microwave equipment revenue, followed by Asia Pacific
  • Pricing pressure on microwave gear persists: Infonetics forecasts ARPU for Ethernet-only units (which account for an increasing proportion of shipments) to decline to around half its 2013 value by 2018
  • Topping the microwave equipment market share leaderboard in 3Q14 are (in alphabetical order): Alcatel-Lucent, Ceragon, Ericsson, Huawei, and NEC.

http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2014/3Q14-Microwave-Equipment-Market-Highlights.asp

T-Mobile Czech Deploys Mavenir's IMS Core + VoLTE

T-Mobile Czech Republic has deployed of a converged IMS Core and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) Application Server solution from Mavenir Systems.   The operator has completed the first VoLTE call and limited pilot in their live network.

"Deploying our converged IMS core and VoLTE solution is a key milestone for us as T-Mobile CZ transforms their network," said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO of Mavenir Systems. "We are excited to continue working with T-Mobile CZ to help them with their launch in Czech Republic."

Mavenir operates its European VoLTE Centre of Excellence in Cologne, Germany.

http://mavenir.com/

NetApp Partners with VMware

NetApp announced a new partnership with VMware to deliver enterprise-class EVO: Rail Integrated Infrastructure.

The NetApp Integrated EVO: RAIL Solution is designed for enterprises and midmarket organizations, including remote and branch office environments with limited IT personnel. The NetApp Integrated EVO: RAIL Solution includes flash-accelerated, scale-out NetApp enterprise storage.

“Customers asked us to take a fresh look at how we could extend the benefits of converged systems to meet the needs of smaller department and branch offices,” said George Kurian, executive vice president of Product Operations at NetApp. “By combining NetApp storage with VMware EVO: RAIL, we now offer an integrated solution that offers simple, cost-effective scaling, enterprise performance and the protection required for business critical applications, a single point of support, and best of all, complete flexibility to integrate with the cloud using the NetApp data fabric.”

http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/press-releases/news-rel-20141203-970055.aspx

Busy week for Partnership Tie-ups in Networking Land

Cisco Teams with IBM on VersaStack Data Center Solution


Cisco and IBM are teaming up to offer an integrated data center solution that combines Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure with the IBM Storwize storage system. The new VersaStack solution, which will be sold through business partners, is aimed at cloud, big data and analytics, and mobility deployments.  Specifically, the VersaStack solution includes the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), ACI-Ready Cisco 9000 Nexus switches, Cisco MDS...

Juniper and VMware Extend Collaboration


Juniper Networks and VMware have closely aligned their private cloud products and sales teams to support customers in the APAC region.  The companies said their increased collaboration will provide the following: Interoperable products, which are available in APAC today, to deliver smart forwarding across physical and virtual infrastructures and provide end-to-end visibility and management of physical and virtualized infrastructures from a...

HP and Alcatel-Lucent Expand Alliance


HP and Alcatel-Lucent are expanding their global alliance to include selected Alcatel-Lucent IP routing and optical products in HP's existing routing and storage portfolios. Specifically, HP Storage will extend its solutions between datacenters to provide joint HP and Alcatel-Lucent customers with fully validated end-to-end business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The companies have certified long distance synchronous, low-latency...

Brocade Partners With Mirantis on OpenStack


Brocade announced a partnership with Mirantis to provide cloud service providers with a new turnkey, OpenStack-based, on-demand data center solution. Mirantis, which is a start-up based in Mountain View, California, offers software and services for running production-grade OpenStack clouds. Its solution provides a visual interface as a single control plane for OpenStack clusters and enables automated hardware discovery and network verification. Brocade...


IBM and Docker Announce Strategic Partnership


IBM and Docker announced a strategic partnership. The Docker platform will make it easier for enterprises to build and run the next generation of applications on the IBM Cloud and on prem. The idea is to develop portable, distributed applications that are rapidly composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers, have a dynamic lifecycle, and can scale to run in concert anywhere from the developer’s laptop to hundreds of hosts in the cloud. IBM...