By Lynn Greiner
ARMONK, N.Y. – Today at the Think Digital Event Experience, IBM announced its new IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager.
Powered by Red Hat OpenShift, it is a unified telecommunications management solution designed to support OSS transformation for communications service providers (CSPs) who want to increase automation and reduce operation expenses. It delivers intelligent AI-driven automation capabilities to orchestrate virtual and container network functions in minutes, with the ability to manage workloads in both OpenShift and on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The platform includes IBM Netcool Operations Insight and IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager running in containers on Red Hat OpenShift.
“There are three market factors that we see converging to create a significant market opportunity for IBM,” said Hillery Hunter, IBM Fellow and CTO IBM Cloud. “One is that rollout, that deployment of edge computing and edge computing infrastructure. Another is the advent of 5G, and the third is transformation of telco networks into cloud platforms.”
“For telco providers to be successful in the 5G era, they need to transform, or to cloudify their networks,” she went on. “Historically, they’ve operated their networks on hardware that had its own specialized software; we call these appliances. This effectively locks them into the appliance provider. By moving instead to a hybrid cloud model, they can process data at their core, and at the network edge across these multiple clouds with consistency. This will lower risk, and it can improve safety and efficiency. As 5G matures, it will become the network technology that underpins the delivery of their services.”
The new joint solution from IBM and Red Hat enables intelligent automation capabilities to orchestrate both virtual network functions (VNF) and container network functions (CNF) with 80% less effort and lower cost, Hunter noted.
The product will be complemented by a new partner ecosystem, the IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem, which includes F5 Networks, Altiostar, Metaswitch Networks, ADVA, and others. The jointly administered ecosystem for VNF and CNF will be delivered by IBM and Red Hat, who are certifying, onboarding and managing CNFs and VNFs from popular VNF vendors so that customers can use them rapidly and confidently to create new network services. Since the technology is open source, the companies promise no vendor lock-in.
New dedicated IBM Services teams will help clients deliver the solutions.
