CALIFORNIA -- Telefonica Business Solutions, a leading provider of a wide range of integrated communication solutions for the B2B market, and Nuage Networks, the Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, today announced the successful completion of evaluation and testing surrounding service chaining of virtualized network functions (NFV) in a multi-vendor SDN environment. This evaluation marks a big step for Telefonica Business Solutions toward automating delivery of value-added services and dramatically improving time to market in serving its enterprise customers.

Provisioning network and application services – such as firewalls and security gateways – can be among the most time-intensive and error-prone tasks when deploying applications. Service chaining makes it possible to automatically insert physical or virtual network service appliances with the appropriate configurations and policies as part of cloud-based offerings. Nuage Networks automates the complex networking and service insertion processes to enable Telefonica Business Solutions to adapt cloud services on demand.

Telefonica Business Solutions and Nuage Networks executed the proof of concept evaluation with Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform working with Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 Service Router (SR) and Virtualized Service Router . The companies also demonstrated seamless integration with Telefonica’s existing third-party IP Edge Routing platforms in the roles of Datacenter Gateway and Datacenter Provider Edge , including integration between the automated value-added applications in the Datacenter and WAN connectivity services. The hybrid solution will provide Telefonica’s enterprise customers the flexibility to make use of automated value-added services together with the optimal WAN service depending on needs for bandwidth, control, cost and quality of service.

Nuage Networks VSP provides the automated overlay networking for Telefonica’s existing VMware virtualization environment as well as a test environment based on OpenStack and the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

The solution includes a service chaining portal to allow fully automated instantiation of virtual machines through OpenStack and third-party APIs. The customer service portal also integrated Network Configuration Protocol provisioning of third-party data center gateways and provider edge and virtual machines to enable and disable services based on input from customers. This opens a new world in terms of customer experience in ICT space.

Telefónica