Amdocs, on Tuesday announced new offerings and enhancements to help service providers transition from today’s physical networks to network cloud service environments, achieving agile and lean operations, while transforming their networks to deliver user-defined services that can be quickly and simply activated.

These new offerings leverage Amdocs’ strengths in both the network and IT software domains to provide deployment-ready solutions that support hybrid physical/virtual networks as service providers begin to map out their virtualization strategies in accordance with ETSI network functions virtualization (NFV) standards.

“More than 250 service providers run Amdocs’ mission-critical solutions. Of those, over 100 already benefit from Amdocs’ network-grade, control-plane solutions, with distributed processing of more than 1 billion low latency events per day in some of our larger deployments. This heritage of service management and orchestration gives Amdocs a unique understanding of the communications market and makes us an ideal partner for service providers seeking to realize the benefit of NFV and cloud-based services,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing.

 “The offerings announced today are designed to help service providers transition to virtual networks via a scalable, software-driven, vendor-agnostic approach and AT&T’s announcement naming Amdocs to its User Defined Network Cloud supplier program is further endorsement of this approach. Our CES portfolio, spanning network control and optimization solutions and operational and business support systems, makes us uniquely positioned to bring the business and the network closer and integrate with existing systems for automated end-to-end service management,” added Rebecca Prudhomme.

Amdocs Network Cloud Service Orchestrator is an open, vendor-agnostic, catalog-driven solution that enables service providers to define and activate complex services containing virtual network functions (VNFs) from multiple vendors in a matter of days instead of months.  Amdocs’ patent-pending technology advances the service operational model by converging service fulfillment and assurance into a holistic, real-time process.  The solution enables the continuous design, fulfillment and assurance of network services, from any VNF vendor, utilizing existing service catalog and ordering systems, over all mainstream cloud management systems and SDN (software defined network) Controllers in a hybrid  physical and virtual environment.

Amdocs NFV Service Partner Program is focused on pre-integrating a rich set of VNFs and NFV infrastructure elements in order to simplify the complexity of service orchestration, improve service time-to-market, and address end-to-end Service Level Agreement considerations. The program currently has 21 partners including Juniper Networks, Metaswitch Networks, Red Hat and Connectum.

Amdocs has a range of VNF products including Amdocs Policy Controller, the industry’s first Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) to fully align with ETSI’s NFV ISG blueprint architecture for management and orchestration.  The Amdocs Policy Controller VNF enables service providers to rapidly introduce highly tuned data offers for performance-critical services such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and customized market applications, including virtual packet core for enterprise. The Policy Controller is supported by a new orchestration-ready element manager that provides a single point of configuration and management across cloud and bare-metal environments, offering service providers a future-proof solution as they invest in virtualized architectures.