UBIqube, a Dublin, Ireland-based startup focusing on orchestration software for the telecom industry, has quietly landed a deal with Japanese service provider giant NTT Group (NYSE: NTT). NTT will use UBIqube's MSActivator Orchestration Framework to deliver NTT's enterprise security services via its Enterprise Cloud and WideAngle security.

The software will be rolled out in NTT's ICT solutions and international communication business within the NTT Group. NTT is expanding its enterprise security services with a broader range of functions and vendors to deliver virtualized capabilities and customer-premises device based systems, according to both NTT and UBIqube.

Network orchestration tools, which help service providers coordinate the hardware and software to initiate, manage, and track customer services, are becoming more important service providers as they aim to deliver more cloud, services.

This deal confirms several trends. First of all, it reflects the motivation of large service providers to introduce new cloud services via software using Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which is what NTT is doing with security. This allows NTT to sell security services to its customers without deploying hardware on site.

UBIqube CEO Nabil Souli, interviewed about a week prior to the announcement, said that security services are one of the first places service providers will look to deploy these Network Virtualization Functions (NFV).

“Selling security services on top of their plumbing is a natural incremental space,” said Souli. “They sell it on a per link basis -- just add the firewall on top.”

Many more WAN services will be delivered in the cloud using software-only, as opposed to requiring a hardware device such as a branch router of firewall appliance to be delivered on the customer site.

Souli says the service providers are beginning to learn that CPE devices are becoming too complicated to manage and they want an easy, cloud-based model to sign up for a service they can download as software. Likewise, service providers like the idea of selling security services through a self-service portal. This appears to be exactly what NTT is doing.

NTT Communications is now providing its customer base with security self-management product using their Web portal, according to UBIqube.

Souli expects this trend to accelerate as service providers look for faster ways to deploy services in a cloud model.

“There's going to be a huge reorg in the telecom space,” said Souli. “We need to see value-added services.”

UBIqube's technology fits into a new segment known as Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), which will be become more important as service providers use Software Defined Networking (SDN) and NFV infrastructure to deliver more cloud services. LSO not only helps connect the virtualized infrastructure the service provider needs to deliver a cloud service, but it also helps track and manage the service for the purposes of fulfillment, service assurance, and monitoring.

The LSO market is expected to grow rapidly for this reason. The Rayno Report has a premium report scheduled for release in the first week of March (more on that later). Some leading players in the LSO market include CENX, Overture Networks, UBIqube, Wedge Networks as well as many others.