$10.1M deal includes SDN technology assets
Sonus Networks bolstered its software-defined networking portfolio, announcing the acquisition of SDN technology assets from Treq Labs for $10.1 million. The deal, which closed on Jan. 2, is expected to be “neutral” on Sonus’ full-year earnings-per-share outlook.
Sonus explained that the Treq SDN technology is designed to optimize networks for voice, video and unified communications targeting enterprises and service providers. Touted benefits include improved network utilization that results in lower network costs; operational expense savings tied to automated provisioning; evolving networks toward a “network-as-a-service” model enabling more robust scaling options; improved quality of service through application-aware policy and real-time network awareness to support service-level agreements; and eliminating reliance on a single hardware vendor.
“Treq’s SDN solution marries programmatic network control with network state awareness and application policy to deliver real-time SLA assurance,” noted Kevin Riley, CTO at Sonus. The company added that the Treq deal was its third acquisition since 2012.
SDN has become an important focus of telecom operators looking to extract maximum efficiency from their network operations. A recent report from Infonetics Research predicted the global service provider SDN and network function virtualization market to grow from less than $500 million in sales in 2013, to $11 billion in sales by 2018.
AT&T last month stated its plans to virtualize and control more than 75% of its network using software architecture by 2020. This is expected to be accomplished through the use of cloud, SDN and NFV technologies.
Sonus’ virtualization efforts
Sonus late last year expanded its session border controller platform in a move designed to help enterprises deploy unified communication features. The updates included support for session initiation protocol interoperability with the H.323 standard that through the Sonus SBCs can enforce security policies at the edge of the network. Sonus also expanded the ability to manage and configure its SBC products using the representational state transfer application programming interface to its SBC 5000 series, SBC 7000 and SBC Software edition SBCs.
In terms of further virtualization, Sonus rolled out its cloud-based Real-Time Communications Monitoring-as-a-service offering, which it said provides a single point of “proactive fault surveillance for customers’ managed SBCs.” Sonus said the system can begin “working issues” as soon as an alarm is identified instead of waiting for a “customer-initiated trouble ticket.”
Sonus also reported that its SBC portfolio completed interoperability testing with BroadSoft’s BroadWorks platform and that Broadsoft was deploying Sonus’ SBCs as part of its BroadCloud managed service. The move is designed to allow for the deployment of hosted multimedia and unified communication services by enterprise session initiation protocol trunking customers. Sonus noted that such a move allows enterprises to sell hosted voice over Internet Protocol and UC services.
RCR Wireless News recently spoke with Mykola Konrad, VP of cloud and strategic alliances at Sonus, to gain more insight into the telecom industry’s move toward network virtualization, where potential bottlenecks may occur, the importance of standards in terms of virtualization and challenges facing continued progress.
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