Undergoing a major transformation, Cisco is looking to underlie this generation’s digitization movement. This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) was hosted in Barcelona, Spain, from February 22 to the 25, and the event targeted mobility service providers around the world.

Cisco Systems, Inc. was on hand at MWC in an effort to transform the carrier business, architecture and experience to offer service providers end-to-end digitization, by allowing them to connect IoT devices to data centers.

Ultra-capabilities

The company unveiled its new product, Cisco Ultra Services Platform, touting it as the product that will enable service providers to digitize their services and offer new revenue opportunities by streamlining their platforms with innovative software-defined mobile and cloud security and leading-edge capabilities.

Cisco cited benefits such as quicker time to revenue, automated deployments, a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) distributed network, Cisco Network Function Virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) integration and orchestration (making it standards compliant), integration with third-party components and 5G capabilities.

Software-defined, on steroids

In order to help service providers compete in an ecosystem where the customer wants more services for less, Cisco is embracing virtualization to offer the carrier click and provision mobile service in minutes. According to Andy Leong, marketing manager, service provider cross architecture, at Cisco, “Ultra has decomposed software and injected it with steroids so that it supports a software-defined architecture.” He also pointed to a recent study citing that 26 percent of all connections are exported to connect to the network through machines.

The company said that the industry is moving to a software model. Infrastructure hardware is commoditized, and Cisco customers can source from a number of vendors so there is no lock-in to Cisco products. “The secret sauce is in the platform and what it enables carries to do,” Leong said.

What is real-time?

As to real-time functionality, the platform offers telco-grade five-nines reliability with less than three minutes per year of downtime. There is a failover that does not affect the user experience. It was tested to have zero impact on service. Live sessions will not have to be re-engaged and are restored in a matter of seconds.

Changing the landscape

“In general, Cisco differentiates from competitors through breadth and depth of service provider solutions, both in software and hardware across mobility, video, cloud, and routing/switching,” according to Leong. He stated that the company has the leading market share in all of these areas.

“We’ve also taken an architectural approach to the network, which incorporates all of these technologies into an open, programmable, agile framework,” he added, noting that Cisco has a leg up on competitors because Ultra is all software and represents the harmonization of virtualization, SDN, and cloud to drive the agility, scale, economics and flexibility.

For more information about the announcements and the event, visit the Cisco news page.

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