At the start of Mobile World Congress Americas this week, Amdocs announced its Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offering, which is the first software and services portfolio for carriers that is based on Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) open source.
As carriers ramp up virtualization efforts, Amdocs says its NFV portfolio can help service providers advance the introduction of virtual services with greater agility, and address time to market challenges.
The offerings can be deployed either locally or in the public cloud using modern DevOps adoption techniques.
“Amdocs brings unique expertise derived from working with ONAP’s early adopters, including North American carriers that include Bell, and European carriers such as Orange, to help service providers drive value from virtualization and this offering lays the framework for additional carrier-grade enhancements as the ONAP code matures,” Gary Miles, general manager at Amdocs, commented. “Open source brings unparalleled agility and innovation to the market. In such a dynamic environment, it is important that the industry is able to package open source contributions into a mature capability set for live network operations.”
“This is what we have achieved with the Amdocs NFV powered by ONAP professional portfolio” he added. “It represents a brand new frontier for the communications and media industry and addresses the many time to market challenges facing carriers who want to rapidly launch new virtual services, and gain the future proof advantages of ONAP open source technology today.”
Amdocs said it offers simple deployment of ONAP and a cloud-based hosting environment along with pre-defined SD-WAN acceleration kit and administration tools for testing and verifying virtual services on ONAP’s open source platform.
Sprint recently provided an update on its virtualization push, and said currently 100 percent of the carrier’s IP Short Message (ISPM) traffic has been virtualized. Meanwhile, SMS will be fully virtualized by the end of 2017, and the company intends to deploy MMS VNF onto the virtual platform at the beginning of 2018, according to Sprint COO of Technology Günther Ottendorfer.
Ottendorfer indicated that NFV initiatives will provide new services that will allow consumers to do more with every day devices, while reducing Sprint’s infrastructure and operating costs. More on that here.