Telefónica Chooses Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator

Linda HardestyJuly 5, 2016
2:37 pm PT

Cisco scored a win for its Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) with Telefónica Business Solutions.

The business unit of Telefónica, which provides communication services for enterprises, selected Cisco’s NSO for automating and configuring its IP infrastructure and business customer premises equipment.

NSO provides an abstraction layer between network services and the underlying infrastructure components. It can be used to automate any service or device—even in complex, heterogeneous operator environments. With NSO, Telefónica can automate the end-to-end service lifecycle and reduce manual configuration steps.

Cisco’s network services orchestrator is enabled by technology originating from Tail-f, a company Cisco acquired in 2014. After the acquisition, some carriers were concerned that Cisco would kill off the open, multivendor aspect of Tail-f’s technology. But today’s news that Telefónica is using Cisco’s NSO seems to indicate that the multivendor compatibility is still in place.

Telefónica is transitioning from manual, workflow-based provisioning to YANG-based DevOps service modeling. Netconf/YANG are open data models of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Other cloud data models include Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) and the TM Forum’s SID.

Recently, several prominent network vendors decided to build their applications and equipment using TOSCA. These vendors include Cloudify, Ciena, HPE, and IBM. The alignment of these vendors with TOSCA is beginning to look like a competitive response to YANG, which is now associated heavily with Cisco.