Packet Design Partners with Aria Networks

Last week Packet Design announced an OEM partnership with Aria Networks, where we will resell their network planning and optimization software with our Explorer suite of network service assurance products. In this quick interview, Aria Networks’ Chief Commercial Officer Wolrad Claudy discusses more about the partnership, how the two technologies are complementary, and the benefits for service providers.

Why did you decide to partner with Packet Design?
Aria Networks decided to further productize our professional services-heavy solution to better support OEM and reseller models as an extension to our direct sales efforts. Further, our clients are looking for more total solutions rather than dealing with the integration of many point solutions. Aria Networks tries to become part of several ecosystems to shorten time-to-market and to expand market reach. Packet Design and Aria Networks not only have complementary solutions, but also similar corporate profiles and go-to-market strategies as well as addressing the same target markets.

How are the two technology sets complementary?
Packet Design’s network service assurance solutions visualize and analyze the network topology, traffic, performance and routing patterns as input for Aria Networks’ optimization engine to make real-time decisions about what to do with the findings from the assurance part. This enables full loop backs without operator intervention.

What is unique about the combination of the technologies?
Aria Networks is a pioneer in taking AI with genetic algorithms into the TELCO/IP world. The solution was based on virtualization technology from day one and therefore is SDN/NFV-ready per design. A unique data representation of any physical or virtual resource allows us to optimize any vendor technology and any parameter/entity, holistically across multi-domains and layers relevant for any engineering, service or business constraint. Aria Networks and Packet Design are bridging the traditionally separated domains of monitoring/simulation and analytics on one side and the action-oriented planning and optimization on the other side. This is a unique step into the automation of OSS, with a clear objective of creating self-organizing/optimizing networks.

What challenges/opportunities are you seeing for your service provider customers worldwide?
As much as our customers’ ROI of their services continue to become marginalized, there is an increasing need to automate the optimization of their infrastructure utilization to minimize CAPEX and OPEX costs. Time-to-market of new services becomes the key differentiator in our industry, shortening new service rollouts from months to days. The paradigm shift from user controlled to software-controlled networks is a decade-long process, which demands solutions that can support the transition by supporting physical and virtual resources in parallel.

What’s next on the Aria Networks road map?
Aria Networks will continue to expand its suite of applications to support service providers on their path from an asset/network engineering approach, via a multi-layer end-to-end service-centric view all the way to business objective-driven optimization. At the same time, we will increase the level of automation by moving from an off-net operational support system towards an on-net real-time component of the SDN/NFV management and orchestration layer.