AT&T Labs hired company veteran Mazin Gilbert who touted the carrier’s ongoing plans for 75% SDN control of network by 2020
AT&T’s push to drive virtualization software platforms deeper into its operations included the recent hiring of Mazin Gilbert as VP of the telecom giant’s Lab division.
Gilbert has been at AT&T for more than 20 years, and said he is focused on helping the company meet its goal of gaining software control of more than 75% of its network by 2020.
In meeting that goal, Gilbert said the carrier was working on delivering its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform for software-defined networking and storage, which includes plans to push ECOMP into the open source community next year.
AT&T unveiled the ECOMP initiative earlier this year, which it said was designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. The carrier said it had been working on ECOMP for nearly two years, tackling the project due to a lack of guidance for NFV and SDN deployments in a wide area network environment.
ECOMP is said to provide automation support for service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management and SDN tasks. The platform is also designed to work with OpenStack, though the carrier noted it was extensible to other cloud and compute environments.
“ECOMP is a stake in the ground,” declared Chris Rice, SVP for AT&T’s Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design. “It’s a declaration that networks of the future will be software-centric, that they’ll be faster, more responsive to customer needs and more efficient. Orange’s decision, as one of the leading international carriers in the world, is a great endorsement of that approach.”
AT&T in July moved on previous commitments in migrating ECOMP to the open-source community. The platform is open to developers interested in building upon the already established software code, with the carrier working with the Linux Foundation on the structure of the open-source release.
In touting the move, AT&T said ECOMP is “mature, feature-complete and tested in real-world deployments. And, we believe it will mature SDN and become the industry standard. Releasing this software into open-source levels the worldwide playing field for everyone. Most importantly, we believe this will rapidly accelerate innovation across the cloud and networking ecosystems.”
More recently, French operator Orange became the first carrier to join the ECOMP program, and said it plans to work with AT&T in developing broader support for the platform. Orange noted it plans to follow-up the lab test with a field trial as part of its own On-Demand Networks program, which sounds similar to AT&T’s Network On-Demand offering.
“The analysis we conducted of ECOMP currently shows it to be highly agile and comprehensive, a testament to the commitment that AT&T has shown to address the key challenges that global service providers all face,” said Alain Maloberti, SVP at Orange Labs Network. “We jointly believe that a platform like ECOMP needs a strong and dynamic open-source community to drive industry adoption, and we will work with AT&T to create a community to develop a reference software platform for automated network orchestration and management.”
The move follows a previous partnership between AT&T and Orange to work on open-source and standardization initiatives linked to the carrier’s push toward increasing control of its network resources using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technology.
Gilbert also cited the connection between ECOMP and AT&T’s work on “5G” technology to drive faster network speeds to support video and entertainment applications.
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