Cisco’s Ultra Services Platform aims to automate, accelerate mobile cloud

BENGALURU: Deutsche Telekom is creating a multi-country mobile cloud. SK Telecom of South Korea is automating new service creation in minutes versus days, and bringing network control to one place. They are doing it with the Cisco Ultra Services Platform, which was formally launched at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. Cisco explained that its Ultra is a complete, virtualized, feature-rich, mobile services platform that helps mobile operators launch and deploy new services faster and more efficiently. Benefits include:

Software-defined networking (SDN) distributed network: It applies SDN to separate control and user plane functionality. User plane functionality can be distributed close to the radio access network, allowing data to shortcut to the Internet. This can help save up to 35 percent of backhaul costs. Service creation and control can be centralized, allowing operators to be more agile

Massive scale: In its first release, the system is tested to over two terabytes per second of traffic handling capacity, and over 20 million connections.

Time to revenue: It simplifies and speeds the introduction of new services, from Connected Car to enterprise private mobile networks.

Automated deployments: It automates the deployment of services through an easy to use user interface. Deployment intervals can be reduced from months to minutes, and deployment costs can be reduced by 30 percent or more.

It helps reduces total cost of ownership up to 30 to 35 percent.

It utilizes and enhances the Cisco family of world-class virtual applications including packet core, policy, security and more.

It is open and extensible: Ultra can easily integrate with third-party components. A full member of the Cisco Open Network Architecture and Evolved Services Platform, Ultra can easily onboard any of the more than 100 virtual applications in the virtualized network functions portfolio, plus third-party virtual applications.

Rapid Time-to-Market of Hybrid Cloud and SaaS Offerings: Ultra is deployable over public, private, or hybrid clouds, and may be combined with Cisco SaaS solutions like Infinite Video, Spark, and others.

5G Capabilities:  Ultra makes 5G capabilities like control and user plane separation (CUPS) and network slicing available today. Operators can take advantage of these features without having to wait for end-to-end 5G.

“As our customers embrace digitization, they are expecting a much more flexible and faster service introduction from their network operators,” said Franz Seiser, vice president Core Network and Services, Deutsche Telekom AG. “We have proven that our distributed approach based on SDN and NFV within our Network-optimized Infrastructure Cloud gives us the flexibility and scale needed to enhance our customers' digital experience to a much higher level.”

“SDN holds much promise to make things easier and faster for our consumer and enterprise customers,” said Park Jin-hyo, senior vice president and head of Network Technology R&D Center at SK Telecom. “It helps our network keep up with the growing demands as customers digitize. Cisco’s approach of integrating SDN into the mobile services core will enable our customers to be served better with exactly what they want, when they want it.”

“With the new Ultra services platform, our global customers will be able to do things in near real time, that previously took hours or days,” said Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president, Service Provider business, products and solutions, Cisco. “Together we are able to deliver a transformational customer experience today, while preparing the industry path to 5G.”

“We are seeing early customer adoption for the Ultra Services Platform, with eight operators worldwide, including three North American operators,” said Scott Yow, vice president, Ultra Services Platform, Cisco. “This unique, SDN distributed architecture will enable our customers to harness the full potential of virtualization, SDN, and cloud.”