SDN Product of the Year Goes to Packet Design

Our SDN Analytics and Automation Platform just won 2016 SDN Product of the Year Award from TMC, which honors innovation in the field. As they stated in their announcement:

“SDN has already had a profound impact on the IT and Telecom industries and, as this technology continues to grow in popularity, the SDN Product of the Year Awards reward companies that are leading the way and building SDN architecture and applications.”

We launched the SDN Platform a little over a year ago on the premise that SDN could not be viable in the place where it is needed most: In complex, multi-service WANs where operators are challenged to deliver more and more disparate services with varying and conflicting requirements. What is the missing element? An SDN management layer critical to creating dynamic, flexible networks that can be reconfigured quickly to accommodate different business requirements.

Packet Design’s SDN Platform fills this missing layer. It is the first independent, vendor-agnostic source of management intelligence needed to optimize the performance and control of multi-vendor underlay and overlay networks. The Platform was built on the unique ability of our Explorer Suite to provide real-time monitoring, back-in-time forensic analysis, and network event and demand modeling. This always-current routing intelligence is the foundation for analytics-driven orchestration in carrier SDNs (WAN-SDN).

With our real-time telemetry, analytics, optimization, and policy, network operators can intelligently provision network resources and quickly turn up new services. We’ve been pleased with the amount of interest our customers have shown in the Platform. Service providers in particular see multiple benefits in SDN, provided that they can have the right visibility and control. In addition to accelerated service activation, these benefits include more resilient networks, improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer satisfaction, and better use of infrastructure and human resources, resulting in lower capex and opex.

In fact, service providers have brought numerous SDN use cases to us beyond what we had initially anticipated. Some of these include multi-layer optimization, running their networks hotter, IP/MPLS traffic engineering provisioning, transport path provisioning, automated path restoration, etc.

Packet Design’s first SDN application, which we launched with the Platform, is an SDN Traffic Engineering (SDN-TE) app. It leverages the Platform (via RESTful APIs) to optimize and provision RSVP-TE tunnels based on available bandwidth and user-specified policies. The goal of the application is to balance link utilization, reducing the load on heavily congested links and increasing it on lightly used links. Network operators can also use the API to populate customer portals with service-specific performance metrics as well as develop their own custom SDN applications.

What’s next for our SDN capabilities? We’re building on some features we introduced last quarter with the latest version of the Explorer Suite. It included industry-first support for Segment Routing, which service providers are increasingly examining and deploying to simplify MPLS traffic engineering and accelerate SDN adoption. We are currently working on new SDN path provisioning capabilities that we’ll be launching in the second quarter.

To see a list of all the SDN Product of the Year award winners, visit http://www.nfvzone.com/carrier-sdn/articles/428887-tmc-announces-2016-sdn-product-the-year-award.htm