Alcatel-Lucent announced that it is expanding its collaboration with Intel Corporation to help operators worldwide improve their time to market and operational efficiency, and to drive the creative development of new products and services for consumers and business customers with the use of cloud technologies.
As long-standing partners already working in the virtualisation space together, Alcatel-Lucent and Intel are committed to accelerating these joint efforts and strengthening this relationship. Both companies believe these are the key underlying technologies to apply their combined resources and expertise and the ones that will drive a huge leap forward for the industry.
Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) appeals especially to mobile service providers now because it allows them to innovate more quickly and easily while providing the best return on their investments in an all-IP network infrastructure such as LTE.
Specifically the expanded collaboration will focus on three areas to accelerate the development of three Alcatel-Lucent platforms optimised on Intel architecture to improve performance and scale:
* Virtualised Radio Access Networks (RAN) portfolio, developing and optimising Alcatel-Lucent’s LTE and LTE-Advanced wireless products. The solution will enable operators to use general purpose platforms in configurations that will reduce TCO and increase operators’ ability to scale networks to satisfy mobile data demand with rapidly changing devices and applications.
* Cloud Platform, developing and optimising Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand NFV platform including joint contributions to the Open source community and a push to accelerate service provider testing, validation and deployment of NFV technology and products.
* High-performance Packet Processing for advanced IP/MPLS platforms and functions to enable Alcatel-Lucent’s IP development team the insights required to use the features and capabilities of Intel® architecture to deliver improved performance in virtualised IP/MPLS functions.
