Open Network Featured Article

The demand for access by consumers and organizations alike is pushing telecoms to migrate to a virtualized infrastructure that is better able to address the complete digital transformation that is taking place. Huawei, a global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, is front and center in its views regarding this issue which has led the company to build open labs to accelerate the cloud migration by telcos.

Huawei (News - Alert) has a plan in place to make this migration possible. And according to CEO Eric Xu, the company's goal is a full reconstruction of infrastructure networks, which includes equipment, network, services and operations, with the goal of helping carriers meet the growing demand for more network bandwidth and performance with its All Cloud strategy.

As part of the All Cloud strategy the company has unveiled four interconnected laboratories which have been designed to give network operators the tools they need to integrate and deploy cloud computing solutions in their corresponding ecosystems quickly and easily.

The four Cloud Open Labs, the Global Network Evolution and Experience Center (GNEEC), NFV Open Lab, SDN Open Lab and DC Open Lab, are linked together with a unified digital operations platform that gives operators access to the technology that is being developed so they can transform their networks. The labs are testing interoperability of products and solutions, conducting proofs of concept, developing certification and authorization programs working with the open-source software.

"Our Cloud Open Labs will establish an industry ecosystem and support open collaboration, allowing operators, industry organizations and partners to jointly address the challenges of digital transformation," said Jim Lu, president of global technical service at Huawei.

Huawei's overall strategy was announced last year when the company launched its ROADS (real-time, on-demand, all-online, DIY and social) initiative, which was developed to further encourage service providers to compete with over-the-top (OTT) vendors that are cutting into their revenue. With ROADS, Huawei wants operators to be more agile and flexible so they can deliver the best user experience for their customers by introducing products to market just as quickly and efficiently as OTTs.

Service providers need an aggressive cloud strategy, multi-vendor integration, full deployments of software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) to address the challenges and embrace the opportunities.

The venture so far has joint innovation projects with Wind River, VMware, Red Hat and Accenture (News - Alert). Additionally, the labs have collaborated with more than 40 partners for solution integration and verification, as well as completing pre-verification for over 550 projects.