Open Network Featured Article

Italian telco TIM has signed on to evaluate ADTRAN’s (News - Alert) SD-Access solution. This offering, called Mosaic, helps service providers automate control and network management processes to reduce human resources requirements and enable customers to self-provision services.

“TIM is actively working on the evolution of the access network towards an open, easily upgradeable and programmable asset with greater operational efficiency, lower TCO, and improved service automation,” comments Andrea Calvi, head of network innovation in TIM. “These are the features we plan to assess on ADTRAN’s solution as part of the ongoing collaboration on our way to achieving the European Commission’s Gigabit Society goals.”

Orchestration is essentially another word for service and network management, but within the SDN conversation it is supposed to work in “open”, multi-vendor environments. That speaks to a couple key goals of service providers in moving to software-centric networks: avoiding vendor lock in and employing agile software development methods for faster time to market.

“The Mosaic Cloud Platform’s open microservices architecture enables our customers to better align network operations and IT development teams while operating their networks at web scale, streamlining service innovation, and capturing additional subscriber mindshare and revenue,” Robert Conger, associate vice president, cloud, and portfolio strategy at ADTRAN, said last year when ADTRAN unveiled Mosaic. “ADTRAN Mosaic also enables our service provider customers to leverage the vast open source market to reduce service disruption and deploy new applications while maintaining a high quality of service.”

ADTRAN is just one of many companies offering orchestration solutions. Among the leaders in this space are Ciena, Cisco, and Nokia. Amdocs (News - Alert) also has an orchestration solution, including intercarrier orchestration. Industry groups like The Linux Foundation and its ONAP effort, and the MEF, have been working on orchestration as well.