Cloudify Selected by Proximus to Support NFV Adoption

Cloudify offers Belgium’s largest mobile telecom provider cloud-native orchestration for deployment of latest networking technology

Belgium’s largest telecommunication company has chosen Cloudify’s cloud-native orchestration platform in its adoption of network functions virtualization (NFV). Proximus, the leading provider of telephony, internet, television and network-based ICT services in Belgium, selected Cloudify as a part of a multi-vendor team tasked with helping the company implement a next-generation, virtualized cloud network.

Cloudify’s role is to provide the NFV management and orchestration and assist with the onboarding and deployment of virtualized network functions (VNFs).

The goal of the Proximus NFV adoption initiative is to transform the company’s traditional hardware-centric networks into virtualized, cloud-native, software-driven domains that are simpler to operate and cost less to maintain. With these more agile and efficient networks, Proximus will be able to react rapidly to market trends, deploy new services, enhance network security, and quickly scale services to meet customers’ changing needs.

Cloudify brings to the project its open source cloud management and network orchestration software, which is used by large telecoms and Tier 1 network operators for cloud automation and NFV.  Cloudify software features a robust set of features, NFV-specific plugins and blueprints to model virtualized network functions (VNFs) and service function chaining (SFC) based on the telecom-friendly TOSCA standard. As the only open source NFV MANO leveraging TOSCA’s native multi-VIM interoperability capabilities, Cloudify has built-in support and blueprints for OpenStack as well as the entire VMware stack, including vCloud Director, VMware Integrated OpenStack and vSphere. It also enables extensibility of hybrid stacks, workloads and microservices, as well as bursting to public clouds for disaster recovery applications.

Proximus’s NFV adoption project, which began last year, is currently in the design, VNF onboarding and acceptance-testing phase. Others contributing to the project include Cisco, F5, HPE, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Spirent and Tech Mahindra. Proximus aims to begin delivery of virtualized production services to customers in 2018.

Supporting Quotes

Alex Thomas, program manager Cumulus & LPWan, Proximus

"NFV adoption is a key component of our strategy for digital transformation, and Cloudify is helping us transform from traditional to virtualized networks that are simpler to operate, cost less to maintain and enable us to deliver better customer experiences.”

Nati Shalom, CTO, Cloudify

“We’re lowering the adoption barriers for NFV by leveraging open source software that accelerates VNF onboarding while reducing technology risk. Working with Proximus, we’re deploying an NFV technology stack that is community-supported and interoperable with multiple cloud environments. As a result, Proximus will have better control of their destiny, costs and competitive advantage.”

William Fellows, research vice president, 451 Research

“Cloudify’s approach supports both physical network functions and VNFs—in software. This enables operators to optimize existing technologies while migrating toward the benefits of automation and DevOps best practices without having to discard existing technology investments.”

Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking and orchestration, ONAP

“Open source projects like ONAP and ARIA are essential to network automation. Cloudify is contributing both code and expertise to our rapidly growing community that is working on the ONAP orchestration platform for enterprises and service providers that are creating IoT, 5G, edge computing and other next-generation applications.”

Cloudify Supporting the Linux Foundation’s ONAP Project

NFV is a major undertaking—technically and operationally. Uniting more than 50 members, including major service providers like AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, and Veon, the ONAP project is developing an end-to-end, closed-loop automation of network services to allow end users to design, orchestrate, automate and manage services within any environment. The result of the February 2017 merger of open source ECOMP and Open Orchestrator (OPEN-O) projects, ONAP represents a major step toward industry convergence around a common operating framework. For this reason, Cloudify is a founding platinum member of ONAP, which is addressing the challenges of broad NFV adoption via industry-wide collaboration on standards-based solutions. Cloudify also participates in several other open initiatives, including OpenStack, the Linux Foundation, ETSI, OASIS TOSCA and the Apache Software Foundation.