Alcatel-Lucent has announced that it would accelerate industry adoption of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) - the consolidation of carrier network functions across distributed industry standard servers - by creating the external linkCloudBand Ecosystem Program, the first open community of service providers, developers and vendors adopting NFV.

NFV technology supports the flexible network infrastructure needed to move complex applications and services to the cloud. It enables service providers to bring the agility, efficiency and economics of the cloud to their own networks and business operations, allowing them to offer cloud services with the performance and reliability that consumers and enterprises expect.

Virtualizing network functions allows faster and more efficient deployment where they are needed. In addition, service life-cycles can be more easily managed to meet dynamic customer demands without the huge investments in time, costs and power that are currently required.

By accelerating service provider transition to NFV, Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem Program will also enable new carrier cloud business models. This will be achieved by opening up access to Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand solution – the first NFV management platform providing multi-vendor product and services support and designed from the start for carrier applications. Developers and vendors can access tools and test applications to ensure they scale and interact within a simulated cloud environment before they reach a service provider’s network. Alcatel-Lucent already uses the platform at its CloudBand Innovation Center (CIC) to successfully ‘onboard’ its own virtualized applications for the carrier cloud.

CloudBand Ecosystem Program members can also access a knowledge center, a forum for discussions and a showcase area with demos and use cases. This will allow members to learn from each other while keeping up to date with the latest industry developments.

Following a limited rollout with a small group of vendors, Alcatel-Lucent has now opened up the CloudBand EcoSystem Program to a wider circle of businesses, with 15 companies – including Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Citrix, Intel, Vyatta, Radware, Red Hat, HP, Nuage Networks, Gigaspaces, StackIQ, Inktank and Nominum signed up.

Axel Clauberg, VP IP and Fixed Access Architecture, Group CTO team, Deutsche Telekom AG,said: “As an industry we need to accelerate the journey towards NFV. There are 2 main parts in making this happen that need to work well with each other through experimentation and iterations: 1. Wide array of best of breed ‘virtual network functions’ that currently run on purpose built HW and 2. An NFV cloud Platform that’s optimized to run these functions at scale. We’re happy to see Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand open up their NFV platform for any company developing virtual network functions to help accelerate this journey.”

Roy Amir, Vice President, Strategy & Ecosystem, CloudBand, Alcatel-Lucent said: "Alcatel-Lucent is dedicated to helping service providers advance quickly in the area of NFV. The CloudBand Ecosystem Program aims to do just that, providing a workspace where companies can access CloudBand and collaborate and learn from each other. This will help service providers adopt a completely new NFV operational model using services and solutions that have been developed with them and their customers’ needs in mind.”