Cellwize, on Thursday announced that it has joined Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem community to help champion Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Working closely with Alcatel Lucent’s NFV initiative, Cellwize’s centralized-SON product, elastic-SON manages and automates mobile operator networks.

“NFV requires an open multi-vendor approach and a high degree of collaboration and exchange between all contributors in the value chain. Cellwize’s SON solutions are hardware agnostic to work in cross-technology networks. This makes Cellwize well suited to help our community quickly advance and innovate NFV solutions. We are glad to have them on board”, said Valerie Noto, Director of Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem.

“NFV is a key technology for operators as it will help reduce costs and simplify network management. Alcatel-Lucent is really helping to pioneer this new and important technology. As the first SON provider in the Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand Ecosystem Program, we can quickly broaden and strengthen our SON offering, to provide a comprehensive SON solution for NFV”. said Ofir Zemer, CEO of Cellwize.

CloudBand Ecosystem Program was established in 2013 to aid NFV innovation, share knowledge and help service providers get it to NFV faster. Cellwize has been testing and developing its own NFV enabled SON solution on Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand distributed cloud environment at the CloudBand Innovation Center. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent’s team of NFV experts has provided training, support and access to this unique infrastructure and workspace. Cellwize can now use this infrastructure to demonstrate how its own elastic-SON and Value-Driven SON solutions work with the CloudBand NFV Platform.

NFV technology allows network operators to move complex applications and services to the cloud. In doing so it provides the agility, efficiency and economics of the cloud to the operators own network. NFV combined with elastic-SON™ or Value-Driven SON™ will provide considerable cost savings in terms of OPEX for network operators and further simplify network management.