When Nokia closes its €347 million (US$370 million) acquisition of Comptel, which is imminent, it's going to inherit a prime virtualization deal from its fellow Finnish vendor. (See Nokia Eyes Bigger Software Role With €347M Comptel Bid.)

That's because Comptel has been chosen as a key supplier of orchestration software for Deutsche Telekom's next-generation, pan-European core network, now officially called Pan-Net but also referred to as TeraStream. (See DT's Pan-Net Picks Up the Pace and DT's Clauberg: TIP, TeraStream & NFV.)

While Comptel Corp. (Nasdaq, Helsinki: CTL1V) hasn't been able to name Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT) as an orchestration customer (it could only identify a large European Tier 1 operator in a December 2016 press release), executives from the carrier giant talked openly about its deployment of Comptel's FlowOne V as its orchestration software during discussions at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

In providing an update during an early evening symposium (talk + booze) on the MWC show floor, Dr. Sven Hischke, managing director of Deutsche Telekom's Pan-Net unit, noted how, with the development of a core European infrastructure cloud distributed across several data centers and supporting 13 markets -- instead of running multiple, standalone national systems with many similarities -- Deutsche Telekom has decided to integrate the "production infrastructure to one pan-European infrastructure cloud." That includes moving the "production logic from legacy hardware platforms into the virtual environment" based on SDN and NFV.

Hischke added that Pan-Net will provide DT's operating companies a "harmonized service catalog," that allow the national operators to build the services they need from a standardized set of "service elements" that can be tailored to local needs and supplemented with third party applications/modules. The aim, ultimately, is to have a much more efficient and streamlined service creation and provisioning process that will enable the operators to build and launch services much more quickly than before.

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At the heart of Pan-Net's distributed cloud is a centralized telecom IT system called iOSS (international OSS). Hischke's colleague, Iulian Stoica Petrescu, the Enterprise Architecture manager at Telekom Romania (one of the Deutsche Telekom operating companies that will make use of Pan-Net), explained that iOSS is a "building block" software deck to support service design, planning, fulfillment, assurance and even billing across a multi-vendor infrastructure that supports multiple operations.

A key part of dealing with the anticipated product and ordering complexity that will come from delivering services via multiple channels and multiple networks that could be physical, virtual or hybrid, is having a "digital service lifecycle management layer," explained Petrescu. And a key function of that lifecycle management layer is the orchestration engine that can "abstract heterogeneous multi-vendor, multi-domain, multi-technology network and IT infrastructures."

And that's where Comptel, a long-standing vendor partner to Deutsche Telekom, comes in. Its FlowOne V "will act as an orchestrator within the end-to-end service management layer, which defines and delivers IT applications and NFV services from multiple data centers as end-to-end services," the company noted in its December announcement.

And the Comptel system meets DT's needs, according to Hischke. He noted that the operator has a "good experience with Comptel... [FlowOne V] fits our specific requirements... for the end-to-end orchestration of our Pan-Net production factory."

FlowOne V was also identified by an industry analyst as a key Comptel attribute when the Nokia acquisition was announced in January. James Crawshaw, senior analyst of OSS/BSS Transformation at Heavy Reading , noted: "I think Comptel is a great fit for Nokia as it brings a strong fulfillment/orchestration solution [FlowOne V] to complement Nokia's service assurance portfolio." (See Nokia's Buying Comptel: What the Analysts Say.)

And it's bringing a prize Tier 1 orchestration relationship too, and there aren't many of those out there currently.

— Ray Le Maistre, , International Group Editor, Light Reading