NEC Corp. and its wholly owned Netcracker Technology subsidiary have joined to launch the Agile Virtualization Platform and Practice (AVP). The AVP comprises tools, platforms, and services designed to assist service providers add software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) concepts and capabilties to their networks.
The AVP portfolio includes:
- The Virtualization Development and Operations Center (VDOC), a collaboration environment designed for systems architecture, network planning, and service design and deployment teams to automate end-to-end service lifecycle management. The VDOC also enables in-house teams to collaborate with third parties such as technology vendors and systems integrators. The VDOC offers what NEC and Netcracker term "Agile methodologies" and a library of reusable service components to simplify and accelerate service integration, testing, and deployment.
- Business Enablement Applications (BEA) designed to enable executives in charge of customer-facing business units to speed monetization of virtualization offerings for both B2B and mass markets. The applications are designed to optimize existing IT capabilities and cost-effectively fill any gaps with existing business support systems (BSS). The BEA can be deployed in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments, NEC and Netcracker say.
- Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) help operations executives make virtual and traditional networks operate simultaneously at scale. It aims to fill gaps in existing service management and management and network orchestration (MANO) platforms and practices to enable automated hybrid network management, including assurance, continuous optimization, security, and stability. The HOM interacts with the VDOC to create a feedback loop between product and development environments.
- The Primary Systems Integration Practice (PSIP) helps executives address business, operations, and technology challenges to smooth the deployment of virtualization technologies in multivendor, best-of-breed ecosystems.
"AVP is more than just a standalone product or a point solution," said Shunichiro Tejima, executive vice president at NEC. "It allows service providers to access NEC and Netcracker's deep-rooted industry expertise across all stages of virtualization deployment. Service providers are challenged to commercialize their SDN/NFV initiatives and launch them, at scale, into the market. With AVP, we can reduce the time-to-market for SDN/NFV deployments and help remove much of the risk associated with digital transformations."
"In order to realize the promise of SDN/NFV technologies, the market needs powerful tooling that supports ‘DevOps'-style collaboration between those who develop new services and those who operate and monetize those services. Such an environment needs to address, simultaneously, the organizational, commercial and operational challenges around onboarding VNFs, rapidly chaining them into services and managing them. The ambition of NEC/Netcracker's solution goes well beyond existing B/OSS and NFV MANO implementations," said Caroline Chappell, principal analyst, NFV & Cloud, at Heavy Reading.
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