SES is accelerating the telco cloud with Amdocs and Azure

In a bid to meet the rapidly changing needs of connected digital society, communication service providers (CSPs) around the world are looking to create open, distributed, programmable networks leveraging software defined networks (SDNs) and virtual network function (VNF) technologies, as well as the hybrid cloud. They are looking to establish network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings to help their business customers achieve greater flexibility and agility, increasing productivity and cost efficiencies. 

Communication satellite operator SES is one such organisation. As a leader in delivering content connectivity solutions to customers everywhere in the world – on land, at sea or in the air – SES operates the only multi-orbit constellation of satellites that combine global coverage and high performance. With over 50 satellites in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) and 20 in medium Earth orbit (MEO), SES offers intelligent, resilient and secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solutions with load balancing across  MEO, GEO, and other access technologies, to deliver cloud-scale, highly available network services.

To efficiently deliver and monetise such services, SES understood that it needed to simplify and automate its current service lifecycle management process to accelerate time-to-market and reduce the cost of service operation and innovation. To bring about this transformation, SES adopted Amdocs’ Microsoft Azure-based Service & Network Automation solution to orchestrate and manage SD-WAN and other virtual network services leveraging the highly agile and scalable infrastructure of the Azure cloud. 

The offering is the industry’s first software and services portfolio to leverage Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) open source to enable service providers to accelerate NFV/SDN adoption and service innovation. Amdocs collaborated with Microsoft to integrate the Amdocs Service & Network Automation solution with Microsoft Azure to enable CSPs to deliver virtual network services using VNFs running on the Azure public cloud infrastructure.

“SES’s vision is to make satellite-based networks a seamless and wholly integrated part of a global, cloud-scale network ecosystem, and implementing standards-based orchestration is key to our network modernisation strategy,” says John-Paul Hemingway, CEO of SES Networks. “To help ensure we succeed in this journey, we are evolving to an open, virtualised and cloud-optimised network architecture. Microsoft and Amdocs are key partners in this journey, as they provide a portfolio of network solutions aligned with ONAP, metro Ethernet forum and a broad ecosystem of enabling technologies.”

SES selected the Amdocs solution to orchestrate and manage SD-WAN and other virtual network services, leveraging an open and extensible platform. This reduces the complexity and cost associated with integrating and deploying services across multiple vendors, technologies, and network domains. The Amdocs solution enables CSPs to deliver managed SD-WAN and value-added virtual network services with the benefits of VNF/SDN, public cloud scalability and service automation. Furthermore, as a multi-vendor and multi-domain pre-integrated service orchestration solution, it reduces barriers and accelerates and simplifies the CSP’s network transformation journey, while empowering them to offer and monetise managed SD-WAN and other virtual network services with lower investment and risk.

“Together with the Amdocs VNF experience and the Microsoft Azure multi-vendor ecosystem, SES can quickly introduce a rich set of innovative new services that can be discovered, deployed and scaled on demand,” says Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of media, network and technology at Amdocs.

“By deploying the Amdocs Service & Network Automation solution, SD-WAN solution and other virtual network functions on Microsoft Azure public cloud, SES has benefitted from a highly agile and scalable infrastructure, enabling the company to accelerate time-to-market for managed virtual network services. 

Using Amdocs Service & Network Automation solution in combination with Microsoft Azure public cloud enables CSPs like SES to become agile and dynamic and innovate faster using programmable and software-driven virtual networks. This strengthens their value, position and capabilities in providing modern services to enterprise and business customers. 

“Through ONAP, networks are moving from being proprietary, closed and hardware-centric to being much more open and software-centric,” says Bob De Haven, general manager of worldwide media and communications at Microsoft. “Through our work with Amdocs, communications and media companies can accelerate their path to open source VNF via Microsoft Azure. SES has become the first company to take advantage of the Amdocs offering, enabling it to build an open network and open ecosystem for innovation and service management, and in turn enabling the network to become a platform that can be managed by software in the cloud.”

Amdocs and SES will present the joint case study at Digital Transformation World 2020. 

Learn more: https://solutions.amdocs.com/Network-NFV-NaaS-SES-Case-Study-LP.html

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.