Overture, innovating at the metro edge for service providers and network operators worldwide, today unveiled its Ensemble Open Service Architecture (Ensemble OSA™). A response to service providers’ need to reduce costs, protect and grow new revenue, and improve customer experience, Ensemble OSA embraces an open ecosystem along with the principles of software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to transform static, labor-intensive networks into dynamic, virtualized, and automated environments for service creation and delivery.

“Service providers view the metro edge as a dilemma – it is the location for revenue-bearing service delivery, it represents an opportunity for network optimization, and yet at the same time presents the greatest operational challenges. To become agile, efficient, and application-aware, we believe networks of the future will be defined by open orchestration, software control, and management,” stated Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst, Infonetics Research. “Service providers will want to evaluate Ensemble OSA, since it demonstrates Overture is listening to the challenges that their Carrier Ethernet customers face.”

Operational expenses can account for up to 85 percent of a service provider’s budget. As such, improvements in operating efficiency have a dramatic effect on the bottom line. Today’s complex environment consists of multiple proprietary management systems, manually intensive processes, a multi-vendor equipment network, and multiple service provider interconnections. Ensemble OSA minimizes operational complexities and inefficiencies by simplifying and automating essential tasks in service creation, activation, and assurance.

To remain competitive, today’s service providers must move from simply selling bandwidth to offering intelligent and dynamic application-focused services. Ensemble OSA unifies connect, compute, and storage resources to enable a new generation of on-demand, application-aware services. This new architecture radically accelerates the innovation cycle, shortening service delivery and assurance times from weeks and months to hours and days.

“Ensemble OSA is a game-changer for our customers,” said Mike Aquino, president and CEO, Overture. “Service providers do not have a demand problem – they have a revenue and cost problem. They are working to transform their bandwidth business into one focused on the customer application experience while dramatically driving down the cost of managing their infrastructure. With Ensemble OSA, we are helping service providers achieve both objectives by bringing the proven benefits of the cloud to the metro edge.”

As an active member of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), MEF, and ETSI NFV project, Overture has engineered Ensemble OSA using open API standards, including OpenFlow, to support straightforward integration into both existing network infrastructures and the evolving communications ecosystem.

Ensemble OSA is comprised of three layers, each of which may include Overture developed components and those developed by service providers or third party vendors.

• Resources – Elements that provide connect, compute, and storage functionality. They may consist of physical devices such as switches, servers and storage arrays, and/or software functions running on virtual machines.
• Orchestration and Control – Software building block functions for data plane control, resource abstraction, and network management that provide the glue connecting the resources to the applications.
• Network Applications – Software packages that leverage one or more of the Orchestration and Control building blocks and tie into a service provider’s back office systems and that of their business partners to create a service or network function.

Communication among layers takes place across standards-based and open application programming interfaces (APIs).

Overture began developing Ensemble OSA in 2012, culminating in a proof-of-concept demonstration. In 2013, Overture is engaged in real-world projects with select customers, building out ecosystem partnerships, and integrating the APIs into the initial set of Ensemble-powered Overture equipment. The solution will be productized, integrated with third-party applications and devices, and available to the general market in 2014.

For more information on Ensemble OSA, please visit the website here. For information about Overture, please visit www.overturenetworks.com or follow @OvertureNews on Twitter.

About Overture Networks

Overture is the preferred provider of Carrier Ethernet solutions for the metro edge. Known for innovative solutions that enable high-capacity Ethernet services over any media including fiber, copper and TDM, Overture has extended its commitment to innovation with Ensemble OSA™. Ensemble OSA is the industry's first open architecture that brings the benefits of the cloud, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and open innovation to the metro edge. By leveraging Overture’s Carrier Ethernet expertise and this new open architecture for software-defined services, network operators and service providers worldwide can maximize operational efficiencies and introduce new revenue-generating services on a scale never before possible.

Overture is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC, with sales offices around the globe. For more information, visit http://www.overturenetworks.com.

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