From September 15th to 17th, 2014, Huawei held the first Global Professional Services Forum under the theme of "Enabling Business and Operations Excellence" in London. This event attracted over 200 guests, including global operators, Internet companies, industry organizations, and analyst institutions. Dr. Howard Liang, Huawei Senior VP and President of Global Technical Service, delivered a keynote speech at the forum.

Service providers have long struggled to control operational costs and increase the speed of service delivery. Incremental networking technology cost reduction and marginal service delivery improvements have not led to dramatic cost savings or improved time to service launch. In fact, the exponential growth of function-specific networking devices in the past decade made matters worse.

This white paper explores the requirements for delivering line-speed performance in a virtual infrastructure environment and reviews an exciting solution to this challenge that is based on a 2U rack-mount chassis with four Intel Xeon E5-4600 v2 series processors, with up to 12 cores per processor, and integrated support for up to 640 Gbit/s of I/O bandwidth.

For the fifth consecutive time, Connect, the biggest telecommunications magazine in Europe performed the largest network performance test in Switzerland. Competition in the Swiss telecom market is fierce and good service quality is a key to winning the competition. In 2011 and 2012, Sunrise, the largest private telecom operator in Switzerland, ranked third among the Swiss telecom operators in the Connect network quality test evaluations, and was rated as "satisfactory".

Virtualization of network functions is an approach that has been successfully implemented in the data center, and service providers are now trying to improve flexibility and service agility and significantly transform their economic cost models. Service provider-centric software capabilities for operations and services automation are also required to accelerate and monetize the creation of new services.

A third wave of Internet expansion, the Internet of Everything (IoE), is expected to come through the confluence of people, processes, data, and things. Cisco estimates the Value at Stake for the IoE is $14.4 trillion over the next 10 years. IoE requires a context-intelligent architecture in addition to massive scale. For IoE, service providers must deliver increasing security, reliability, and availability with networks that also provide greater service velocity and flexibility.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is generating a lot of excitement, primarily as a way to simplify networking. It comes to the industry at a time when growing demand, greater service diversity, and increasing infrastructure complexity have challenged the ability of network operators to turn up and take down services quickly.

The NSA has pioneered data ingestion techniques and analytics at a scale previously unheard of, at both a national and international level. Facebook allows its users to interactively query petabytes of data, and it has also pioneered fraud detection to protect its users by checking 25 billion read and write actions every day. Moving from limited monitoring to "measuring everything" is the accepted way of detecting anomalous behavior at companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Etsy.

Telefonica, one of the main supporters and adopters of network functions virtualization (NFV), believes the full benefits of functions virtualization can only be gained if the industry can agree on a common NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM). This white paper, written by Heavy Reading's Caroline Chappell, explains the challenges and requirements associated with the development and adoption of a common NFVI and VIM.

On June 23rd, more than 170 attendees from network operators, service providers, analyst firms and component companies from around the world convened in Nice for the inaugural Optical Innovation Forum, including Telecom Italia, Telefonica, NTT, JDSU, OVUM and Current Analysis.

It's no secret that today's advanced attackers have the resources, expertise, and persistence to compromise any organization at any time. Malware is pervasive. Traditional defenses, including firewalls and endpoint protection, are no longer effective against these attacks, which means that the process of handling malware must evolve, and quickly at that.

Cisco Validated designs (CVds) provide the framework for systems design based on common use cases or current engineering system priorities. They incorporate a broad set of technologies, features, and applications to address customer needs. Cisco engineers have comprehensively tested and documented each CVd in order to ensure faster, more reliable, and fully predictable deployment.

Any cyberattack, large or small, is born from a weak link in the security chain. Weak links can take many forms: outdated software, poorly written code, an abandoned website, developer errors, a user who blindly trusts. Adversaries are committed to finding these weak links, one and all, and using them to their full advantage.

Cisco Validated designs (CVds) provide the framework for systems design based on common use cases or current engineering system priorities. They incorporate a broad set of technologies, features, and applications to address customer needs. Cisco engineers have comprehensively tested and documented each CVd in order to ensure faster, more reliable, and fully predictable deployment.