Arpit Joshipura | 11 December 2017
“Bell has been engaged in the ONAP journey from day one and committed to get it to production to demonstrate its value,” said Tamer Shenouda, Director of Network Transformation for Bell.
Bell, Canada’s largest communications company, is the first in the world to deploy the open source version of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) in production. Bell has built the capability to automate its data center tenant network provisioning on top of the ONAP Platform, providing its operations teams with a new tool to improve efficiency and time to market. This is the first step in using ONAP as a common platform across Bell’s networks on its journey towards a multi-partner DevOps model.
As part of the company’s Network 3.0 transformation initiative, Bell and its partners used Agile delivery to launch a minimum viable product with the platform and will continue to adapt it to ensure that it best supports the needs of Bell customers. This significant development sends a clear message to the industry that ONAP is ready and usable, and that carriers don’t need to implement all ONAP components from day one to start production. Bell has also leveraged the capabilities of ONAP Operations Manager to simplify deployments, drastically reduce footprint and enable continuous delivery.
“Bell has been engaged in the ONAP journey from day one and committed to get it to production to demonstrate its value,” said Tamer Shenouda, Director of Network Transformation for Bell. “This demonstration will encourage other partners to take a similar incremental approach in delivery and operations of the platform, and we look forward to other telecoms launching ONAP to production.”
ONAP is a Linux Foundation project that unites two major open networking and orchestration projects – Open Source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O). ONAP brings together top global carriers and vendors, using shared knowledge to build a unified architecture that allows any network operator to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions.
“We’re very proud to be the first member of the ONAP Project to demonstrate the viability of the platform live on our network,” said Petri Lyytikainen, Bell’s Vice President, Network Strategy, Services and Management. “The evolution of our advanced software-defined networks will enable us to respond even faster to the unique needs of our customers.”
Bell is a founding Platinum Member of ONAP. Platinum members include: Amdocs, AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Cloudify, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Jio, Nokia, Orange, Tech Mahindra, Türk Telekom, Vmware, Vodafone, and ZTE.