“SES’s vision is to make satellite-based networks a seamless and wholly integrated part of a global, cloud-scale network ecosystem, and implementing standards-based orchestration is key to our network modernisation strategy,” said JP Hemingway, CEO of SES Networks, SES’s data-centric business unit. “To help ensure we succeed in this journey, we are evolving to an open, virtualised and cloud-optimised network architecture, with Microsoft and Amdocs as key partners in this journey with their portfolio of network solutions aligned with ONAP, MEF and a broad ecosystem of enabling technologies.”
This new offering will enable SES to rapidly build network solutions that are powered by its fleet of Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, and extensive ground infrastructure to provide scalable connectivity services to underserved markets, including rural areas, out at sea or in the skies, as well as to areas affected by disasters.
“SES is taking steps to leverage its leadership position in satellite communications to drive significant business growth through simplification of the network, deeper customer engagement, increasing overall network availability through intent-based traffic management, and rapid deployment of new capabilities and services to support growing bandwidth and security requirements,” added Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of Media, Network and Technology, Amdocs. “Together with the Amdocs NFV experience and the Microsoft Azure multi-vendor ecosystem, SES can quickly introduce a rich set of innovative new services that can be discovered, deployed, and scaled on demand.”
In addition, SES will use the Amdocs NFV orchestration solution to create an automated, virtualises service creation and delivery environment. This in turn will allow SES to serve its broadcast, telecom, corporate and government customers with applications and technologies such as SD-WAN, WAN optimization, high security, unified threat management (UTM), all of which can be configured, customised and verified over the Microsoft Azure public cloud infrastructure.
“Through ONAP, networks are moving from being proprietary, closed and hardware-centric to being much more open and software-centric. Through our work with Amdocs, communications and media companies can accelerate their path to open source NFV via Microsoft Azure,” added Bob De Haven, general manager, worldwide media & communications industries, Microsoft. “SES has become the first company to take advantage of the Amdocs offering, enabling it to build an open network and open ecosystem for innovation and service management, and in turn enabling the network to become a platform that can be managed by software in the cloud.”
