OneAccess Networks says that its new OneOS6 operating system manages both physical and virtual services. The telco vendor has noted that its service provider customers need a migration strategy from their legacy networks to virtual networking.

“Our goal is to make that OS common across all our platforms both virtual and physical,” said Pravin Mirchandani, chief marketing officer of OneAccess Networks.

OneAccess rolled out a virtualization platform in 2016 that included an array of virtual network functions (VNFs) for service providers to supply to their enterprise customers. The VNFs are offered on a range of white-box hardware, also from OneAccess.

Mirchandani said, “The VNF platform was based on OneOS. Now, we’re making that same OS available on our physical, legacy CPE. We discovered at telcos that their journey is going to take some time.”

OneOS6 supports command line interface (CLI) as well as Netconf and Rest APIs. And everything in the operating system is modeled in Yang. “This gives a multiplicity of choice for service providers to engineer their services with both physical and virtual,” said Mirchandani. “OneAccess is focused exclusively on selling to service providers. We’re offering them a future platform, which allows them to start today with CLI and move to Netconf Yang for the future. It’s very much a future migration story.”

The company has updated its operating system so service providers can use it however they like: with traditional, physical customer premises equipment (CPE), with white box CPE, or as a VNF hosted in the telco cloud. “It’s the same OS wherever you put it,” said Mirchandani.

Part of the hang-up in terms of moving to virtual networking relates to the provisioning of the services. Telcos want to provide portals where their customers can self-select network services. And they're moving toward management and network orchestration (MANO) for that self-service provisioning of VNFs. But they still must also work with their legacy OSS/BSS systems.

With OneAccess’ operating system, they can provision their classical CPE with their traditional OSS/BSS systems. “When their MANO is ready, they can provision using Netconf and Yang,” said Mirchandani. “Our support allows them to provide normal managed services today and move to cloudification of network services using the same equipment.”

France-based OneAccess has been selling routers and other equipment to telcos, mostly in Europe, for about 17 years. But it has recently broken into the North American market, winning business with three un-named ILECs. It's working with one of these customers on network virtualization.

OneAccess was recently acquired by Ekinops, an optical transport vendor that sells DWDM gear to service providers. In the merger announcement, Ekinops said “OneAccess has developed a strong presence with very large operators (with 15 customers in the world’s top 30), while Ekinops mainly addresses second-tier carriers, many of which are in the U.S. market.”

In addition to the expanded geographical reach of the combined companies, Mirchandani said, “They’re layer 1, and we’re layer 2-3.  They also saw an opportunity for layer convergence.”

Ekinops is keeping the OneAccess brand name.