SD-WAN + Intelligent Underlay Connectivity + LSO Orchestration = New Revenue

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF, shares a summary of the MEF 3.0 strategy to combine standardized SD-WAN services with high speed, intelligent underlay connectivity services to deliver a better customer experience and create new revenue opportunities for service providers. SD-WAN + intelligent underlay connectivity fabric + LSO APIs for service automation = new revenue-generating hybrid networking solutions.  “We...

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MEF LSO APIs critical to enabling on-demand services across providers

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, Daniele Mancuso, EVP, ICT Engineering, Sparkle, shares his perspective on how the global communications service provider is leveraging MEF LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) to accelerate go-to-market plans for digital services. He spotlights the importance of LSO APIs not only for service automation within a service provider network, but also for orchestration of dynamic services across an ecosystem of...

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Progress Update: MEF LSO Sonata APIs for Inter-Provider Service Automation

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, David Ball, Principal Engineer, Cisco and LSO Committee Co-Chair, MEF, shares a progress update on the standardization of LSO Sonata APIs used for inter-provider service automation. “LSO is going to be the biggest thing that helps transform the industry over the next few years. It’s really exciting to be part of this thing that’s so needed to help service providers integrate with each other and speed up the...

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Verizon Australia to provide business services via NBN Co.

Verizon Australia will provide NBN Co. sourced business connectivity services to Australian enterprise and government customers. Verizon has provided managed network and security services to enterprise and government customers in Australia for over 20 years including 75-plus Commonwealth and State Government agencies in Australia. Verizon said its enterprise customers will continue to be able to take advantage of the company’s entire suite of...

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Dell'Oro: Worldwide VoLTE revenues up 16% in 2Q 2019

The worldwide Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) infrastructure market appears the tipping point of preparing 5G networks for voice with VoLTE is upon us as indicated by the growth rate we saw in 2Q 2019,” said Dave Bolan, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “Licenses shipped to service providers in China and India accounted for most of the 62 percent growth in the Asia Pacific region. With 5G services expected to launch in October 2019, Chinese service providers...

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Regional utility deploys ADTRAN Total Access 5000 in Smart Grid

A leading regional utility provider in the U.S. has deployed ADTRAN's Total Access 5000 (TA 5000) platform to improve the reliability and resiliency of its high-density Smart Grid power grid distribution network. The deployment, which is an industry first, leverages the TA 5000 fiber access platform in targeted service areas as the enhanced communications system to its automated switching devices. The ADTRAN network that has been deployed is a secure,...

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Nutanix revenue dips to $299.9M, subscriptions now at 71% of sales

Nutanix reported revenue of $299.9 million for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended July 31, 2019, down from $303.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, reflecting the reduction of pass-thru hardware from $35.9 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 to $13.0 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, and the revenue compression from the company’s ongoing transition to subscription. Billings amounted to $371.7 million, down from...

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Comcast's Robert Victor joins MEF's Board

Robert Victor, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Comcast, has joined the MEF Board of Directors. “As a leading voice in SDN-enabled Ethernet solutions and services, Comcast Business is deeply committed to working with the MEF to enable next-generation network services that help businesses and their customers succeed as they progress along their digital transformation journeys,” said Victor. “Comcast Business is looking forward to working...

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Box posts revenue of $173m, up 16% yoy

Box reported revenue for its second quarter of fiscal year 2020 of $172.5 million, an increase of 16% from the second quarter of fiscal year 2019. Billings for the second quarter of fiscal year 2020 were $172.9 million, an increase of 6% from the second quarter of fiscal year 2019. GAAP net loss per share, basic and diluted, in the second quarter of fiscal year 2020 was $0.25 on 147.0 million weighted average shares outstanding. This compares to...

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Lumentum appoints Penny Herscher as Board Chair

Lumentum appointed Penny Herscher as chair of its board of directors. Herscher was one of the founding board members of Lumentum as it spun out of JDSU in 2015.She currently also serves on the boards of Faurecia SA, Verint, and PROS Holdings, Inc. Ms. Herscher previously served as CEO of FirstRain, a privately held company in the unstructured data analytics space, as CEO of Simplex Solutions, a publicly traded electronic design automation company...

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Keysight joins 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation

Keysight Technologies has joined the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation (5G-ACIA) to help establish a framework for test and verification that will accelerate deployment of new industrial 5G use cases. Keysight said its expertise and portfolio of network infrastructure, device and application test solutions will support 5G-ACIA, a unique alliance in the informational and communications technology (ICT) industry, to accelerate the...

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VMware builds its Telco and Edge Cloud portfolio

VMware, which already has a deep presence with communications service providers and enterprise customers, is expanding its automation and security capabilities for telco, Edge and IoT applications. With its recent acquisition of Uhana, VMware will deliver a real-time deep learning engine to optimize the quality of telco network experience. Uhana provides a predictive artificial intelligence engine that optimizes the mobile network subscriber experience....

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Qualcomm envisions a future of 5G + Wi-Fi 6

Qualcomm outlined its end-to-end vision and differentiated technology approach to expand the global impact of Wi-Fi 6, and help usher in an era of connectivity innovation where Wi-Fi 6 and 5G work together. “Qualcomm Technologies has been at the leading edge of wireless innovation for decades, by virtue of our focused investment in research and development across various industries,” said Rahul Patel, senior vice president and general manager, connectivity,...

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Dell'Oro: Evolved Packet Core sales up 13% yoy

Evolved Packet Core (EPC) revenues were up 13 percent year-over-year (Y/Y) in 2Q 2019, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.  5G Core deployments are expected in 2020. “EPC revenues grew for a fourth consecutive quarter at double-digit percentages, growing 13 percent Y/Y in 2Q 2019,” said Dave Bolan, Senior Analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “You can hardly go a day now without a 5G launch being announced somewhere in the world. That means...

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McAfee: Ransomware attacks on the rise

There has been a significant resurgence in ransomware attacks, according to McAfee Labs Threats Report: August 2019, which tracks cybercriminal activity and the evolution of cyber threats in Q1 2019. While spearphishing remained popular, ransomware attacks increasingly targeted exposed remote access points, such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP); these credentials can be cracked through a brute-force attack or bought on the cybercriminal underground....

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Vantage Data Centers raises $692M for North American expansion

Vantage Data Centers raised $548 million in new securitized notes, inclusive of expanded Variable Funding Note undrawn capacity, as well as $144 million in project-based construction debt financing from a consortium of banks. The company plans to used the funds to refinance existing floating rate credit facilities, significantly reducing interest expense, and to fuel the development of data centers across North America. “Vantage continues to pioneer...

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SK Telecom demos mmWave 5G inside race car

SK Telecom held a demonstration of 5G technology at the ‘Korea International Circuit’ racetrack using Samsung Networks’ end-to-end 5G mmWave solutions, including 5G New Radio (NR) base stations. The same equipment has been in commercial operation in the United States since the first half of this year. While the racing car moved at approximately 130 miles per hour (210Km/hour) on the track, the trial verified the stable performance of live downloads,...

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TPx picks ADVA's Ensemble software for uCPE

TPx, which provides unified communications, managed IT, network security and network connectivity to over 53,000 customer locations across the U.S., has selected ADVA's Ensemble software as the basis of a new universal customer premises (uCPE) platform. ADVA's virtualization suite will be used to power TPx's ReadyEdge uCPE offering, enabling it to quickly and easily roll out and manage multiple dynamic virtual network functions (VNFs) for its enterprise...

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ZTE reports 1H19 revenues of US$6.23B, up 13% yoy

ZTE reported operating revenue of RMB 44.61 billion for the first half of 2019, representing an increase of 13.1% compared with the same period last year. Net profit amounted to RMB1.47 billion, representing an increase of 118.8%, compared with the same period last year. Basic earnings per share was RMB 0.35. Some highlights: Production has begun on ZTE's 5G wireless system chipsets and transport switching network.  The company has completed...

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VMware Tanzu portfolio targets Kubernetes

VMware unveiled a portfolio of products and services for building, running and managing software on Kubernetes. VMware Tanzu includes a technology preview of Project Pacific, which is focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform—unlocking its potential for the hundreds of thousands of vSphere customers. This includes: vSphere with Native Kubernetes - embedding Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere will transform...

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Mellanox's latest SmartNICs deliver 200G I/O and Security

Mellanox introduced its latest generation ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 Secure Cloud SmartNICs for data center servers and storage systems. The ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to two ports of 25, 50 or 100Gbps, or a single port of 200Gbps, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gbps PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity. Significantly, the new SmartNICs' hardware offload engines include IPsec and inline TLS data-in-motion cryptography,...

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Video - Mellanox's Michael Kagan on SmartNICs

Michael Kagan, CTO and co-founder of Mellanox Technologies, talks about the next step for SmartNICs and the company's newly released ConnectX-6 Dx product driven by its own silicon...

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Apstra builds automation between physical network and SDN overlays

The latest release (3.1) of the Apstra Operating System (AOS) is introducing tighter design, build, and operational interoperability between the underlying physical network and software-defined overlay networks, including VMware NSX network virtualization. Specifically, AOS 3.1 enables customers to confirm that any underlay network they design, deploy and operate meets several criteria to reliably support NSX including VLAN configurations, MTU settings,...

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Video - SD-WAN Security: 3 Things Customers Look For - Fortinet

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, Joan Ross, Field CISO, Fortinet, highlights 3 key things customers are looking for with SD-WAN security and shares her view on the importance of MEF standardization work on the subject. “MEF’s work is so important right now to SD-WAN and specifically to SD-WAN security….We look at the customers who are using SD-WAN….and how MEF can help drive standards so that across SD-WAN solutions – whether at the customer level or the service provider level – the integration is seamless and security means the same thing...

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Video: SD-WAN, Intelligent Underlay Networks & the Edge - Dan Pitt, MEF

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, Dan Pitt, SVP, MEF, outlines MEF’s strategy for SD-WAN and how it relates to MEF's work on intelligent underlay connectivity services, LSO APIs for service automation, and the intelligent edge. “This is the year of SD-WAN, and MEF is making a big play in SD-WAN." All the things that MEF does are coming together with SD-WAN.  MEF has a series of intelligent underlays – Carrier Ethernet, Layer 1 Optical, and IP – that are now feeding lucrative overlay, upper layer services like SD-WAN. At the same time,...

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AT&T’s John Donovan steps down

John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, will retire effective October 1. Donovan joined AT&T in 2008 as Chief Technology Officer, overseeing the company’s global technology direction and innovation road map. He was then promoted to AT&T’s Chief Strategy Officer and Group President—AT&T Technology and Operations, before being named CEO of AT&T Communications in July 2017. “It’s been my honor to lead AT&T Communications...

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Equinix and VMware expand partnership

Equinix and VMware, which have been working together since 2013 to enable hybrid cloud infrastructures, announced an expanded partnership wherein VMware will support Equinix as a global colocation provider for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. The aim is to help customers simplify complex hybrid multicloud deployments, and accelerate their digital transformation in public cloud and edge deployments. In August 2018, Equinix teamed with VMware to offer...

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Blueprint: Kubernetes is the End Game for NFVI

by Martin Taylor, Chief Technical Officer, Metaswitch In October 2012, when a group of 13 network operators launched their white paper describing Network Functions Virtualization, the world of cloud computing technology looked very different than it does today.  As cloud computing has evolved, and as telcos have developed a deeper understanding of it, so the vision for NFV has evolved and changed out of all recognition. The early vision of...

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VMware: 10 million VMs run on VMware Cloud Provider clouds

At the opening of its annual VMworld 2019 event n San Francisco, VMware is announcing enhancements to its VMware Cloud Provider Platform. The company counts more than 4,300 VMware Cloud Providers in more than 120 countries operating out of more than 10,000 data centers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud along with strategic regional providers with specific geographic, vertical industry, or service expertise. “VMware’s Cloud Provider...

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Splunk to acquire SignalFx for cloud monitoring

Splunk agreed to acquire SignalFx, a provider of SaaS real-time monitoring and metrics for cloud infrastructure, microservices and applications. The purchase price is approximately $1.05 billion, to be paid approximately 60% in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. SignalFX's analytics is built on a a massively scalable streaming architecture. The company is based in San Mateo, California is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures,...

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Huawei advances its AI with Ascend 910 processor and MindSpore

Huawei officially launched its Ascend 910 AI processor as well as its "MindSpore" AI framework. The Ascend 910, which is designed for AI model training, delivers 256 TeraFLOPS for half-precision floating point (FP16), and 512 TeraOPS for integer precision calculations (INT8). Its max power consumption is only 310W.  All of these are new industry benchmarks, according to the company. Huawei claims its MindSpore AI framework is adaptable to...

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