Network Management Featured Article

Overture Helps Carriers Make Their Networks More Programmable, Cost Efficient

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

The rise of the smartphone created a platform on which virtually anybody could quickly build and introduce new services and applications to customers. A similar model is now possible, leveraging the carrier network as the platform.

That’s the word from Overture Networks Michael G. Aquino, president and CEO, and Mark Durrett, head of marketing, who met with TMCnet this week at COMPTEL (News - Alert) PLUS.

This is important because Overture is focused on providing service providers with solutions that drive the cost out of their networks, and enable them to launch new services quickly so they can get to revenue as soon as possible.

Among the news additions to the Overture product line to help make that happen is the 65F10, a 10-gigabit optical Ethernet access device, which the company introduced this week. It’s designed to support such applications as enterprise cloud services, Layer 2 router offload, and mobile backhaul.

When Aquino came aboard 18 months ago to lead Overture, Durrett explained, he wanted to simplify the company’s product portfolio, which contained some products with overlapping functionality. Part of that effort involved the introduction last year of the 65 series. The first offering in that product family was a 1-gigabit Ethernet access device that raised the bar in terms of performance, timing precision, and ability to accurately measure parameters related to service level agreements. Now it’s adding to that with the 10-gig product, which adds capacity both in terms of the number of services it can offer and the number of ports available. In addition to access devices, Overture offers aggregation network elements.

These products are part of Overture’s larger open service architecture called Ensemble, which includes controller and orchestration functionality. Service providers can leverage to accelerate and optimize their service activation, and opens the door to a plethora of new applications that use virtualization for better scalability and lower cost operations.

Overture last summer began shipping its aggregation solutions, which run Ethernet over any medium. It started shipping the software at the turn of the year, and it will add the controller functionality in April. In the not too distant future, Overture also expects to introduce solution packages that bundle its architecture with other vendors’ components for end-to-end solutions.