Huawei has announced its Transport Innovation Platform (TIP), which basically sounds like souped-up software-defined networking (SDN).

TIP is based on Huawei’s expertise in optical transport, and it builds on the company’s networking technology all the way up to the application layer. It also uses Huawei’s ONOS-based open source controller.

Huawei wants to enable services that benefit from SDN but that are based on templates so the customer doesn’t have to understand all the complexities of network technology, says Nagaraja Upadhya, VP of fixed network products for Huawei Technologies USA.

Its ONOS-based SDN controller “is our service innovation engine so people can easily configure their services,” he says. “This helps people to focus on the business rather than the network.”

Two hot business models for SDN that Huawei recognizes are bandwidth on demand and data center interconnections (DCIs). “These two segments, we feel a lot of innovation is going to happen,” says Upadhya.

Huawei has cooperated with its service provider customer Telefónica in conjunction with Sedona Systems, a company that maps the optical and IP networks for service providers. In that partnership TIP provides open APIs for integration with Telefónica and Sedona Systems devices.

Although many times the hardware in a network comes from Huawei, “sometimes other vendors provide their devices, and their controller only works with [their devices],” he says. Therefore, TIP can also interface with third-party SDN domain controllers from different vendors, achieving coordination between different vendor transport networks.

In December 2015, China Unicom said it was using Huawei's SDN technology with what it referred to as “IP + optical synergy” on the Hangzhou metro transport network to optimize bandwidth usage on leased lines for government and enterprises.