The race to land NFV orchestration business from major telcos is heating up. Cyan is the latest to claim a customer win, on Thursday announcing CenturyLink has signed on to use its Blue Planet NFV orchestrator.
Facing flat or declining revenue in the traditional voice and data services businesses, telcos are scrambling to find new revenue streams. Many are now embracing NFV as a way to quickly deploy new customer offerings, with CenturyLink’s move closely following Telefónica’s selection of HP for NFV orchestration last week.
Financial terms of the CenturyLink agreement with Cyan were undisclosed.
The deal marks the first publicly announced tier-one service provider customer for Cyan’s Blue Planet, which combines a proprietary software-defined network (SDN) controller with NFV orchestration capability. The platform supports third-party vendors through open APIs.
Cyan claims 120 production deployments for Blue Planet since launching the platform in 2012.
CenturyLink, the third largest U.S. telco firm with 6.1 million broadband subscribers and 12.4 million access lines, will use Blue Planet to deploy new services to its enterprise and SMB customers. Cyan is working with a range of virtual network function (VNF) vendors to ensure compatibility with the platform, allowing telcos to pick and choose vendors more freely than with hardware-based solutions.
“When you offer a service to an enterprise customer,” says Cyan CMO Joe Cumello, “you typically have to deploy new pieces of equipment, new software, and it’s a very high level of complexity.
“The whole purpose behind virtualizing networks, and this move toward SDN and NFV, is to simplify that process, make it way faster and less expensive to get new services out.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Blue Planet’s SDN controller is proprietary, rather than OpenDaylight-based.