Huawei Buys Rump of Irish SDN, NFV Specialist

News Analysis Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief 7/13/2015

Huawei has acquired the technology assets of Amartus, a privately held next-generation OSS vendor based in Dublin, Ireland, that has developed software that can manage virtual (SDN, NFV) and traditional networks.

No financial details were announced but the price is not thought to be substantial. Amartus raised €1.2M in January 2013 from Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland. (See Kernel Capital Invests in Amartus.)

The Chinese vendor is buying Amartus's Chameleon SDS (Software-Defined Services) system and hiring the Irish company's senior management and product team based in Ireland. However, it declined to say how many staff were transferring to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , which already has telecom software development facilities in Ireland. Amartus has more than 50 staff in total. (See Huawei Opens New Euro R&D Site.)

What remains of Amartus will continue to support existing customers and engage in telecom software development and systems integration services.

Chameleon SDS is a multivendor orchestration system that can be used to configure and provision services in legacy and virtualized networks. The ability to manage existing and next-generation virtualized networks is critical for communications service providers looking to build their cloud capabilities and figure out how they can benefit from the introduction of SDN and NFV capabilities while still running their existing networks. (See Bringing Together NFV MANO & OSS.)

"Amartus has a service orchestration platform which is highly adaptable, so its data model can equally be used to manage existing physical networks and the virtual environment," notes Caroline Chappell, Heavy Reading's principal analyst, Cloud and NFV, who describes Amartus as "a good little company."

Huawei says the Amartus technology will enable it to "accelerate its SDN roadmap and improve its competitiveness in SDN solutions and services by introducing fast business innovation and multi-vendor capability," suggesting it has been lagging some of its main rivals in terms of developing its own multi-vendor capabilities.

The latest version of Chameleon SDS, announced in March this year, can "manage and orchestrate unlimited number of services, service components (SCs) and service access points (SAPs)," according to Amartus. "Moreover, the latest Chameleon SDS v4.0 architecture will deliver uptime of up to 99.9999% due to its high-availability active-active node configuration, which ensures continuous service even if one or more compute nodes fail or during maintenance and upgrades."

The acquisition should boost the Chinese vendor's orchestration story, notes Chappell. "Huawei really needed something to go up against the likes of Tail-f [part of Cisco], Alcatel-Lucent's Dynamic Motive OSS and Ericsson's and HP's service orchestration developments," adds the analyst.

Need to know more about the management and orchestration of virtual network functions? Then check out our dedicated NFV MANO content channel here on Light Reading.

Amartus isn't alone in having developed such orchestration capabilities, of course. UBIqube has had success with major operators in the past year, Nakina is making progress with its Network Integrity Framework, while many traditional OSS companies are scrambling to develop capabilities. (See NTT, UBIqube Team on Managed Security DevOps, Orange Unveils NFV-Based Offering for SMBs, Management & Orchestration Enablement Strategies Required for NFV Commercial Success, NTT Communications Deploys UBIqube and WebNMS Tackles Telco Silos.)

For more on Amartus and the increasingly important orchestration sector, see:

— Ray Le Maistre, , Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading