Alcatel-Lucent adds members to CloudBand ecosystem
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Alcatel-Lucent adds members to CloudBand ecosystem

Alcatel-Lucent has added 19 companies to its CloudBand Ecosystem Programme, in a bid to advance industry adoption of network functions virtualisation (NFV).

The French vendor’s CloudBand platform is an open community of virtual application vendors and service providers working to develop NFV innovation, share knowledge and get to market faster.

“NFV requires an open, multi-vendor approach, as well as a high degree of collaboration and exchange between all contributors in the value chain,” said Dor Skuler, VP and GM of Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand unit.

“The CloudBand Ecosystem Programme provides this workspace and leverages the open CloudBand NFV platform to support a strong community of inclusion that is quickly advancing and innovating NFV solutions that are compatible for the telecommunications industry,’’ Skuler added.

Launched last year, the programme now includes 6WIND, Cellwize, Contextream, EXFO, Fusion-io, IPgallery, JDSU, Netrounds, Peer App, Procera, PT Innovation and Systems, Qosmos, RADCOM, Red Hat, Saisei Networks, Sonusnet, TIeto, vArmour and VMware.

The platform now has 36 members and offers partners free and open access to a live and distributed cloud infrastructure, enabling members to test applications in a simulated cloud environment and demonstrate their NFV solutions to service providers.

Michael Sullivan-Trainor, executive analyst of networking and mobility at analyst firm TBR, said: “Forming partnerships to develop NFV use cases is a requirement of the service providers, but initiating an ecosystem of partners across suppliers and developers is a powerful way to accelerate the eventual adoption of NFV.”

Sullivan-Trainor added that Alcatel-Lucent stands out as the only supplier taking the initiative to drive forward such an ecosystem.

“This leadership will help the industry realise the benefits of NFV that much faster,” he said.

Alcatel-Lucent has been focussing heavily on the development of NFV and last month, Saudi Arabia’s Mobily deployed one of its NFV solutions.

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