NEC and Netcracker Technology unveiled their Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution, intended to help service providers generate new revenue in both business services and residential markets. The solution is intended to provide an end-to-end environment to create, deploy and monetize value-added services via virtualized network infrastructure and services, cloud applications, orchestration and commercialization tools through an open ecosystem of pre-integrated partners.

NaaS is the first in a series of solutions powered by NEC/Netcracker's Agile Virtualization Platform and Practice, first announced in May. The solutions are intended to enable service providers to take a faster approach to commercializing new services through the use of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies.

"Service providers are increasingly looking beyond their traditional core offerings as they face continued competition and price erosion. The need to rapidly onboard and launch new services, including enhanced network facilities as well as third-party offerings, is critical as they broaden their revenue mix," said Fran Heeran, Vice President and General Manager of SDN/NFV at Netcracker. "The NEC/Netcracker NaaS solution provides a complete, end-to-end environment that supports the definition, provisioning, orchestration and lifecycle management of complex services. It leverages the advances in both network and function virtualization to allow a new level of flexibility and automation, lowering costs and reducing time-to-market."

The cloud marketplace in NEC/Netcracker NaaS brings together basic network services (such as enterprise vCPE, residential CPE and SD-WAN), value-added network services (such as firewalls, bandwidth-on-demand, web filtering and WAN optimization) and cloud-based business productivity applications.