The purpose of several regional telecoms’ investment in Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is to provide secure cloud management, high-speed mobile Internet access and continuous application availability.

Regional mobile operators are deploying Cisco’s ACI to increase IT efficiency, reduce operational costs, improve scalability for future growth, and free up IT staff time to better service their customers.

ACI provides a new SDN approach to solve their common challenges with unified control of both physical and virtual environments, enhanced security, and policy-based automation — as a result new customer services can be delivered to market much more rapidly, said Cisco in a statement on Wednesday.

Integra

Integra, a regional telecom provider in the western United States, has decided to replace its aging infrastructure with two new data centers to serve customers.

Integra decided to invest in software-defined networking (SDN) technology, as well as transform its organizational structure to roll out new customer services, and operate more efficiently. With Cisco ACI, Integra expects to realize staff productivity gains and increased revenue worth an average of $1.05 million per year over 5 years, which would result in a 5-year ROI of 368 percent and a break-even period of 9 months.

Stephen Fisher, vice president for Network Planning and Security at Integra, said: “We needed to change our approach to meet demands of our rapidly changing market, and we decided that ACI could help us do this by making us think about services and security more holistically, while giving us the scalability we need.”

NTT Docomo

Japan’s NTT Docomo selected Cisco ACI as the SDN solution to improve efficiency by automating virtual network function deployment and increasing visibility. Cisco ACI will enable Docomo to repurpose the network as subscribers and applications change, and improve subscriber experience during network recovery and congestion periods by adjusting fabric operations based on application policy.

Seizo Onoe, chief technology officer of NTT Docomo, said: “We built an NFV system employing Cisco’s SDN solution ACI for our network infrastructure.”

Hutchinson Networks

The UK-based Hutchinson Networks has deployed Cisco ACI to deliver cloud hosting with advanced networking services. Cisco’s SDN technology and data center solutions provided Hutchinson Networks with a cost-effective platform for Fabrix, a new service that empowers users to provision automated virtual environments tailored to the specific needs of their organizations.

Stephen Hampton, CTO of Hutchinson Networks, said: “Cisco ACI and the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches are built from the ground up for automation in a way that traditional platforms aren’t. The result is automation that is relatively easy to implement for Fabrix.”

Tele2

Tele2, based in Stockholm with 16 million customers in nine countries, decided to move its network and IT functions to the cloud, using Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

Tele2 selected Cisco ACI for the entire data center, which will be built on a spine / leaf network with modern 25Gb/100Gb connectivity. Tele2 expects to have the first live application in the form of a virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) in the cloud by Q3 this year.

Niklas Sonkin, COO of Tele2 AB, said: “We are strong believers in 5G and are actively contributing to the evolution of 5G as a member of Next Generation Mobile Networks. Cloud and virtualization are important building blocks for the foundation of 5G technology.”

Manx Telecom

Manx Telecom migrated 50,000 fixed voice customers in the Isle of Man to a virtualized IMS core provided by Metaswitch, including enterprise cloud-based Intelligent Voice services for business customers. The project used an underlying platform which consisted of Cisco ACI, Cisco UCS cloud-based compute infrastructure, and virtualization provided by VMware.

Manx Telecom is one of the first operators in Europe to run a live telecom over a shared SDN and Network Function Virtualization Function (NFV) architecture.

Kevin Paige, CTO of Manx Telecom, said: “We achieved significant Capex savings by using shared solution architecture rather than the industry norm of a single platform for a single service. And we improved customer service through much faster cycle times to deploy, test and deliver new services to market.”

The above list of telecom operators does not have any names from India.

Telecomlead.com