Alcatel-Lucent inaugurated a cloud research and development center in Kfar Saba, Israel and outlined its plans to accelerate the rollout of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking technologies.
“We believe new technologies like NFV and Software Defined Networking are going to massively change the networking landscape,” stated Michael Combes, Alcatel-Lucent’s CEO. “They will lead the industry’s network transformation to a cloud-based approach.”
“Having world-class cloud facilities in Israel, as well as in Silicon Valley, gives Alcatel-Lucent two of the brightest centers in the world focused on excellence in cloud technologies,” Mr. Combes will comment. “Their location, in global innovation hubs, underscores our commitment to cloud’s evolution, which we see as one of the most integral and influential technologies shaping next generation networks, communications, business and the economy within the next five years.”
Alcatel-Lucent’s cloud facility in Israel operates in close collaboration with the company’s Bell Labs innovation arm and is an incubation center for NFV activities and customer projects. At the center of this work is Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand™ solution — the industry’s first open, multivendor NFV management platform enabling service providers to bring the benefits of the cloud to their own networks and business operations while offering cloud services with the security, reliability and quality enterprises and consumers expect from telecommunications networks.
The facility at Kfar Saba also has a collaborative relationship with major Israeli universities, specifically Tel-Aviv University and Technion, to research distributed cloud optimization.
Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand solution is an open NFV platform for the distribution, automation and life-cycle management of cloud services. The CloudBand Management System orchestrates and optimizes services between the communications network and the cloud, while the CloudBand Node provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software to host a wide range of cloud services.
