Join us on a 1-mile walk around central San Jose, California to discuss some of the big trends around Telco Cloud and Edge while enjoying the scenery.
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Video: Prospects for Telco Cloud and Edge
Monday, August 30, 2021
Kaloom appoints Marc Tremblay as Chief Sales Officer
Kaloom has appointed Marc Tremblay as Chief Sales Officer.
Tremblay most recently led sales teams at Pivotal (later acquired by VMware), generating significant business results and customer satisfaction during the four years he was there. Prior to that Tremblay concluded a successful 30-year career with IBM that saw him lead numerous teams across multiple industries culminating with his role as Vice-President, Communications Sector where his team grew the business 300 percent over four years. In addition, Tremblay has served on numerous Board of Directors including Averna Technologies, Golf Québec and Groupe Conseil OSI where he also served as President.
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Kaloom hires George Khatchadourian to lead strategic partnerships
Kaloom appointed George Khatchadourian as Executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships.
Khatchadourian most recently was COO of IBM Americas and prior to that COO of IBM Japan. IBM Americas Operations represent a $30B+ Business spanning the US, Canada and Latin America. IBM Japan is the second largest country in IBM Worldwide Operations. His previous roles included Vice President of Strategy and Transformation for Global Markets, and Vice President of Service Delivery at IBM Japan, Global Technology Services.
"After a successful career at IBM, I am extremely excited to join Kaloom and to leverage my experience in technology, innovation and Global operations to drive Kaloom’s go-to-market strategy to higher levels,” said Khatchadourian. “Continuing to build on the long and deep relationships established to date, I look forward to strengthening Kaloom’s partnerships with IBM and Red Hat and other Strategic Partners."
Kaloom lands new funding for its Unified Edge
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Itential and Kaloom aim for automated 5G network slicing
Itential announced a partnership with Kaloom targetting the ability to integrate, automate, and deploy 5G network slicing intelligence. Customers will become better equipped to unlock the monetization of 5G through automation, network slicing, and virtualized network fabrics connected to the cloud.
Kaloom’s Cloud Edge Fabric solution disrupts the technical, operational, and economics of how distributed cloud edge and data centers are built and managed. With an embedded 5G user plane function (UPF), Kaloom’s solution enables the virtualization of network fabric needed for telecom providers to communicate within the larger network environment.
Itential simplifies and accelerates the deployment and automation of multi-domain, multi-vendor network infrastructures. The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code, cloud-native solution that seamlessly connects to any IT system, cloud, or network technology for end-to-end automation of any network use case, making it an ideal solution for automating and orchestrating advanced capabilities like 5G Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) creation and 5G network slicing.
“For operators to extract returns on their massive 5G investments, they need the means to offer and charge for differentiated services,” said Roy Chua, Principal at AvidThink, a research and analyst firm. “However, many operators worldwide are struggling to put together the underlying end-to-end infrastructure that can power these offerings. Kaloom and Itential’s partnership couples an agile network automation solution with a flexible network fabric, enabling network operators to bring such services to market much faster.”
“We are excited to be working closesly with Itential on a shared mission to enable telecom providers for 5G networking orchestration,” said Suresh Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Kaloom. ”We have a strong alignment in terms of our views of the modern network and how it should be managed. Partnering with Itential to create new functionalities allows us to offer the differentiation needed for leading our customers into the future.”
Itential and Kaloom will be discussing the integration in more detail during Itential’s live-streamed webinar scheduled for June 8, 2021 at 12 p.m. ET. The webinar, Cloud to Core to Edge: Making 5G Network Slicing a Reality will feature a product demonstration and plans for 5G rollouts, honing in on end-to-end customer solutions for multi-customer network slicing. Other speakers at the webinar include leading executives from Equinix and AvidThink.
https://www.itential.com/news/itential-and-kaloom-integrate-to-automate-5g-network-slicing/
Thursday, May 20, 2021
Kaloom lands new funding for its Unified Edge
Kaloom, a start-up based in Montreal, has secured additional capital for its fully programmable and automated cloud-native edge center networking software solution.
Kaloom's Cloud Edge Fabric is an automated and programmable network fabric with built-in support for network slicing featuring an embedded multi-Terabit per second (Tbps) 5G UPF that is a highly performant, scalable, low latency cloud native solution. Coupled with the Unified Edge solution, which integrates Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform into the Cloud Edge Fabric, the solution can streamline and optimize resources at the edge.
Kaloom said it is in active Proof of Concept (PoCs) trials with over 10 tier-one global communication service providers. In April, Kaloom announced an expanded partnership with Telenor and the integration of its 5G packet core UPF within Telenor’s larger ecosystem of integrated partner solutions.
The new funding brings the total amount raised by Kaloom to US$32.5 million, Series A. As a part of new financing, Alternative Capital Group (ACG) has become the majority shareholder of Kaloom.
Kaloom also announced the appointment of Stéphane Boisvert as Kaloom’s President. Boisvert has held executive positions with Pivotal (Acquired by VMware), Bell, Sun Microsystems and IBM.
Kaloom’s founder, Laurent Marchand, will retain his role of Chief Executive Officer and focus more on accelerating innovation and feature velocity to serve the market demands.
“The investment from ACG is a vote of confidence for Kaloom’s disruptive solutions and business model,” said Boisvert. “If you look at what Kaloom is doing with its software defined architecture, Kaloom is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. It would require a company to turn its business model upside down to replicate Kaloom’s technology and business model. I am looking forward to working with the phenomenal leadership team to bring to market a truly programmable, networking fabric, which is disrupting how differentiated services will be delivered from the 5G enabled cloud edge.”
Monday, April 26, 2021
Kaloom delivers UPF to Telenor’s multivendor 5G SA core
Telenor has assembled a multi-vendor, 5G core environment consisting of best of breed Network Functions from Oracle, Casa-Systems, Enea and Kaloom, all running on Red Hat's Openshift Kubernetes platform.
Kaloom, along with its partner MBUZZ Europe, confirmed that it has provided its 5G packet core User Plane Function (UPF) within Telenor’s larger ecosystem of integrated partner solutions in a unique cloud-native trial to gauge the readiness of cloud-native deployments.
Telenor recently demonstrated its Proof-of-Concept (PoC) trial with Kaloom’s UPF offering, as well as Telenor’s other partners’ web-scale, cloud-native technologies. With the eventual goal of commercializing a vendor neutral standalone 5G Core solution, the PoC demonstrated Telenor’s ability to on-board network functions provided by vendors such as Kaloom onto a microservices-based, containerized, vendor-neutral Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture that features scalability, user-friendliness, resource efficiency and openness.
Kaloom’s 5G packet core User Plane Function (UPF) integrates with Red Hat OpenShift and provides a multi-tenant, high performance (multi-Tbps throughput capacity), low latency, cloud-native solution with embedded support for more secure 5G network slicing complemented by full automation capabilities to enable faster time to services and 10X TCO savings. 5G network slicing enables the creation of virtual data centers whereby an edge data center can be partitioned into multiple independent virtual data centers, where each virtual data center is provided its own virtual fabric. Each vFabric can be assigned to a different operator/customer, thus enabling multiple operators to share a common distributed cloud architecture. Tenant separation is flexible as separation is done at the hardware (port) level with full isolation offering better security and better quality of experience.
“This trial proves that a multi-vendor 5G Core is indeed possible on a vendor neutral platform. It is important to mention that we were positively surprised by the readiness of the involved partners for cloud native,” says Patrick Waldemar, Vice President, Telenor Research.
“As the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift is an ideal platform to run multi-vendor, interoperable functions as a single cloud platform. Our collaboration with Kaloom enables networking, including 5G-UPF services as a first-class citizen in a containerized world, thus reducing operational challenges and accelerating time to productivity,” said Darrell Jordan-Smith, senior vice president, Industries and Global Accounts, Red Hat.
Building a cloud-native, multivendor 5G SA mobile core
Telenor is building a cloud-native, multivendor 5G Stand Alone (SA) core built on Red Hat OpenShift.
In this video, Hitendra Sonny Soni, SVP Worldwide Sales & Marketing at Kaloom, talks about Telenor's proof-of-concept trial with Kaloom’s 5G packet core User Plane Function (UPF) offering.
Video: It takes a Village to Build the Edge
The forces of cloud-native containerization are liberating today’s workloads, moving them closer to end-users. But delivering on the promise of the 5G edge will take a village, says Hitendra Sonny Soni, SVP Worldwide Sales, Kaloom.
This 7-minute video shares key market drivers and requirements to build the edge. Kaloom, working in concert with Red Hat and Intel, offers a Unified Edge Solution.
Thursday, October 15, 2020
Perspective: Growth occurs at the cloud edge
by Hitendra “Sonny” Soni, senior vice president worldwide sales and marketing, Kaloom
Elvis Presley sang the song “If I can dream” in ‘68, inspired by the turmoil a growing nation was going through. In today’s pandemic reality, connectivity has become more important than ever, but innovation needs to take place at multiple levels to get us where we need to be.
When our startup was founded, the assumptions that SDN and NFV would deliver programmability, automation, drive down costs and disrupt vendor lock-in had not yet materialized despite years of effort from the networking community.
While SDN promised the Net Ops engineer’s dream of a truly programmable network, it initially enabled just a limited amount of additional software control and flexibility. Without programmability, the hardware could only perform the functions it was created with and networking would continue to lag behind the rapid advances made in other cloud technologies such as storage, compute and application development.
Gartner comments about SDN’s “Plateau of Productivity” on the analyst firm’s famous hype-cycle curve has led to multiple pundit headlines such as “SDN is dead, long live SDN” and my personal favorite “SDN has left the building.” However, these are not just about naming nuances. They represent the true pitfalls of SDN as it was originally intended – specifically taking so long to mature, being difficult to operationalize and not delivering on lowering networking’s costs.
Whatever you were doing, or wanted to do, in software you couldn’t change what the non-programmable chip/hardware was capable of. This meant that the much-anticipated rapid innovation pace of software development and open source collaboration that were supposed to accelerate networking capabilities were still hamstrung by a years-long hardware product cycle. If I could dream of a truly cloud-native programmable fabric, here are five characteristics that cloud-native edge solutions would look like.
1. Open Source
The real vision of SDN and NFV is built on community-based, open-source standards such as those from the IETF, ONF, The Broadband Forum, The Linux Foundation, and many others.
Recent years have seen an entire ecosystem of truly open-source, collaborative communities geared towards solving the challenges created by SDN’s initial vision. In fact, there are so many “.orgs” working on this that it can be confusing for service providers to decide which one to use to address each of its various needs. Today, many of these have joined, merged, or collaborated with the IEEE, Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Apache, Linux and – in the case of Kubernetes – its Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), among others.
2. Live Truly on the Edge
New 5G-enabled apps require extreme low latency which demands a distributed edge architecture that puts applications close to their data source and end users. We can’t have autonomous vehicles or other mission-critical manufacturing apps experiencing loss of signal, network interruptions or increased latency. The delicacy of their connection to the network must be automatically prioritized. Workloads need to be managed and decisions made at edge-level precision which requires an end-to-end latency below 10 milliseconds. Much of our public cloud infrastructure today is not yet set up for this.
For example, the latency from New-York to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure in Northern - Virginia is greater than 20 milliseconds. Simply not good enough. The image below, which is taken from The Linux Foundation’s State of the Edge (SOTE) 2020 report, demonstrates the importance of low latency in supporting next-gen applications.
3. Make Real-Business ‘Cents
At the moment, the 5G business case is simply not justified, and carriers will not deploy true nationwide 5G because there is no demand for it yet and there needs to be an opportunity to monetize. For example, service providers’ revenues from smartphone users running 3G/4G were about $50 per month. However, connected cars will only generate about $1 or $2 per month, and installing 5G requires extreme amounts of upfront investments, not only in antennas but also in the backend servers, storage, and networking switches required to support these apps. The reality is that 5G will requires a 10x reduced total cost of ownership for the infrastructure deployments to be profitable.
To succeed any new technology must deliver significant economic disruption. One example of this is network slicing, or partitioning network architectures into virtual data centers while using the same shared physical infrastructure. With 5G-enabled secure, end to end, fully isolated network slicing, it’s conceivable that different service providers – for example MVNOs – could share the same physical network resources while maintaining different SLAs and offering differentiated services. They could also share a half- or full rack, depending on how many servers their apps require. This could enable initial 5G service rollouts while minimizing costs, and risks, via shared infrastructure.
4. Be Green
If there is anything this pandemic has taught us, it is that efficiency is king. We all stopped and realized just how much we needed to get by and how much was wasted. As the global manufacturing economy came to an abrupt halt in early 2020, we turned our focus on critical infrastructure. In that light, many local central offices (COs) are nearly maxed-out in terms of available space, power and cooling, leaving little room to support additional rack units (RUs).
In fact, large regional cloud facilities were not built for the new distributed edge paradigm and service providers’ legacy Central Office (CO) architectures are even more ill-suited for the shift. Containing an odd mishmash of old and new equipment from each decade going back at least 50 years, these facilities are also typically near the limit of their space, power and cooling requirements.
This major buildup to 5G-supported edge infrastructure will have an extremely negative impact on the environment in terms of energy consumption. According to the Linux Foundation’s State of the Edge 2020 report, by 2028 it will consume 102,000 megawatts of power and over $700 billion in cumulative CAPEX will be spent within the next decade on edge IT infrastructure and data center facilities. We need technology that can dramatically and rapidly reduce the power required to provide these new 5G services and apps to consumers and enterprises. This image, also from the SOTE2020 report, shows the massive need for more power to support 5G and its next-gen apps.
5. Built on Collaboration
The “edge” is complicated and in many cases cloud players and telcos have yet to fully comprehend how to manage distributed edge locations and the next-generation of applications they will run. In order to truly succeed this dream takes a village to build, where carriers, network operators and cloud-native solution providers work together. Because if we dream it, we can build it. We truly believe in our calling and we may yet get to that promised land. Ok, that is the last Elvis pundit for this post. Thank you very much.
Hitendra “Sonny” Soni is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Kaloom. With over 25 years of experience in sales, business development and marketing in the data center and cloud networking, converged infrastructures and management solutions, Sonny is a passionate entrepreneur, who has spent his entire career bringing innovative technology to the market.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Kaloom’s Cloud Edge Fabric integrates with Red Hat OpenShift for unified edge
The solution integrates Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Kaloom’s Cloud Edge Fabric, which supports sophisticated services chaining to improve overall networking efficiency. Hybrid 4G and 5G infrastructures can be supported with cloud native network function (CNF) fabric architecture
“We are pleased to work with Kaloom to announce a solution designed to deliver production-ready Linux containers and Kubernetes to service providers with Red Hat OpenShift, specifically for edge computing. Our extended collaboration in open source communities shows our shared commitment in moving networking capabilities in cloud native technologies towards an automated, unified approach based on open standards,” said Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat.
“Edgecore is pleased to collaborate with Kaloom and Red Hat in support of their innovative Cloud Edge Fabric integrated with Red Hat OpenShift. The combined solution running on our open network switches deliver the performance and flexibility required to support complex next generation networks,” said Loren Staley, Chief Technology Officer at Edgecore Networks.
“We see tremendous value in collaborating with Kaloom and Red Hat, as we work together to reduce operational challenges associated with the deployment of edge computing at scale. Our fully integrated, optimized, deployment and management solution, called Lenovo Open Cloud Automation, enables our joint customers to accelerate the implementation of infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, firmware and software, from days to hours, resulting in up to 5x improvement in deployment times,” said Charles Ferland, Vice President and General Manager, Networking and Communication Service Providers at Lenovo.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Kaloom appoints McGinn as Chairman of Board
McGinn previously served as CEO of VeriFone Systems, one of the world's largest point of sale terminal vendors and a leading provider of payment and commerce solutions, and CEO of Lucent, a multinational telecommunications equipment company. While at Lucent, McGinn oversaw and directed engineering, research and investments of more than $4 billion annually, and was involved in the acquisition of, or investment in, more than 30 technology companies. McGinn was also a founder and Investor of Sky Capital from 2014 to 2016. Additionally, he was a General Partner of M.R. Investment Partners from 2010 to 2014 and of RRE Ventures from 2001 to 2010.In addition, Kaloom appointed Hitendra Sonny Soni as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. Soni has previously held executive positions at Snaproute/Infoblox, HPE, CliQr/Cisco, ServiceMesh/DXC, VCE, Accelerated Networks/Calix and Xylan/Alcatel-Lucent.
https://www.kaloom.com/
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
Kaloom and Linux Foundation open Virtual Central Office lab
The lab offers a unified Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform application infrastructure for Virtual Network Functions/Cloud Native Network Functions (VNF/CNF) vendors to test their applications.
Virtual Central Office (VCO) is a solution for multi-vendor NFV deployments in the traditional telco central office and at the distributed cloud edge. The solution is designed to be used for residential, enterprise and mobile VCO services by telcos and enterprises. The VCO 3.0 initiative, currently under development, defines a cloud native multi-vendor Central Office with an initial focus on mobile services with a lab setup designed for both virtual machine based VNFs and cloud native container-based CNFs in a full 5G architecture.
Kaloom provides a fully automated virtualized CO networking solution together with Red Hat’s NFV infrastructure.
Kaloom’s Software Defined Fabric™ and Cloud Edge Fabric solutions leverage a programmable multi-Tbps fabric to increase the performance and to lower the latency for NFV application servers and storage. It also provides customers a way to program their infrastructure using the open standards-based P4 programming language to add new services quickly. The solution enhances CPU utilization for VNF applications and embeds sophisticated service chaining offload to the data plane to accelerate the overall performance and lower latency even further. Sophisticated end-to-end network slicing is supported natively in the fabric with full tenant isolation down to the hardware level for better security. Network slicing is a key innovative aspect of 5G architectures that provides customers their own virtual network slice for a better quality of experience.“Our Cloud Edge Fabric solution was designed to address the key requirements for the cloud edge market, such as lowering latency and improving performance at a lower price. We believe that automation, unified VNF/CNF, programmability and network slicing will disrupt the way service providers deploy and manage cloud edge data centers, and we are very excited to demonstrate these capabilities with the community in the VCO 3.0 lab in Montreal,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO at Kaloom.
“We are very pleased to help launch the VCO 3.0 lab in Montreal together with our members. This enables us to bring the open networking community closer together with multiple vendors to test VNFs and CNFs in containers for different 5G, cloud native and edge use cases, and demos” said Heather Kirksey, vice president, community and ecosystem development, the Linux Foundation.
https://www.kaloom.com/press-release-vco3-lab-availability?utm_content=91139926
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Kaloom raises $10 million for its software-defined fabric for whiteboxes
The latest financing was led by the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, and Somel Investments, with the participation from MBUZZ Investments. This cash infusion brings Kaloom’s total investments to $20.7 million.
“We see a strong need among current beta and other potential customers to do something ‘bottom up’ with the networking fabric, where the switches self-discover and self-provision themselves automatically in a network that ultimately supports programmability,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO and founder of Kaloom. “The latest funding round is validation of Kaloom’s approach and where we believe the industry is moving; enabling us to grow faster than planned and respond to growing customer demand.”
“In a very short period, Kaloom has developed world class software for data centers. We are excited to see such strong interest in the company and its solution and see a bright future with Kaloom. After our initial investment for Kaloom’s launch in 2017, we are pleased to continue to support the company’s growth,” said Gaétan Morin, President and CEO of the Fonds de solidarité FTQ.
Kaloom also announced tha appointment of Mike Rymkiewicz as its new vice president of sales, and Thomas Eklund as Kaloom’s vice president of marketing.
- Kaloom's SDF, which is designed to virtualize the data center, leverages P4-based programming capabilities initially in switching silicon from Barefoot Networks. A physical data center can be partitioned into multiple independent and fully isolated virtual data centers (vDCs). Each vDC operates with its own Virtual Fabric (vFabric), which can host millions of IPv4 or IPv6 based tenant networks. Its software-defined fabric offer interfaces to standard orchestration systems and SDN controllers such as Openstack (ML2), Kubernetes Container Networking Interface (CNI) and OpenDaylight (NETCONF). Initially, supported white boxes include Accton, Delta and Foxconn, which have been designed for hyperscale and distributed data centers. The SDF features self-forming and self-discovery capabilities, as well as zero-touch provisioning of the virtual network and virtual components with automated software upgrades.
- The Kaloom Software Defined Product Family consists of the following components:
Kaloom Software Defined Fabric
Kaloom vRouter
Kaloom vSwitch
Kaloom vGW (virtual gateway)
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Kaloom collaborates with Red Hat on a Virtual Central Office for NFV
Kaloom has developed a Software Defined Fabric (SDF) for automating and optimizing data center networks based on open networking white box switches.
Kaloom's SDF, which is designed to virtualize the data center, leverages P4-based programming capabilities initially in switching silicon from Barefoot Networks. A physical data center can be partitioned into multiple independent and fully isolated virtual data centers (vDCs). Each vDC operates with its own Virtual Fabric (vFabric), which can host millions of IPv4 or IPv6 based tenant networks.
The joint solution with Red Hat leverages Kaloom’s programmable fabric to help increase the performance and lower the latency for NFV applications. Specifically, Kaloom said its solution enhances CPU utilization for virtual network function (VNF) applications by offloading sophisticated service chaining functionality and embedding it into the data plane to accelerate overall performance and lower latency. It offers integrated service chaining offload, virtual cloud router and virtual switch capabilities. It also provides customers with a way to program their infrastructure using the open standards-based P4 programming language to add new services and capabilities.
“We see a strong need among current beta and other potential customers to have an open multivendor NFV solution. Our advanced service chaining capabilities significantly increase performance and lower latency delivering better overall network performance and lower costs for data center operators,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO and founder of Kaloom. “Red Hat is a great partner for us to bring this solution to market.”
http://www.kaloom.com
