Today, Netcracker Technology and its parent company NEC introduced a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offering based on virtualized components from a network functions virtualization (NFV) marketplace. The NaaS is targeted at service providers that want to commercialize new virtualized products quickly to earn more revenue.

NEC and Netcracker are pitching the NaaS as a way for service providers to expand their relationships with their own enterprise customers beyond just connectivity services. With the NaaS, service providers can offer a bevy of new business-to-business products. And enterprise customers can purchase these services on demand through a self-service portal.

The NaaS brings together virtualized network infrastructure, cloud applications, orchestration, and commercialization tools through an ecosystem of partners. It enables the provisioning of new services, including third-party offerings.

NEC/Netcracker’s NaaS is part of its Agile Virtual Platform, which it launched in May.

Services available in the NaaS marketplace include enterprise vCPE, residential CPE, SD-WAN, firewalls, bandwidth-on-demand, web filtering, WAN optimization, and cloud-based business productivity applications.

Service providers can personalize bundles of services for different markets.

The NaaS also comes with a systems integration service, which NEC and Netcracker say takes a lot of the risk out of virtualization for both service providers and end users.

In an interview with SDxCentral last week, Ari Banerjee, senior director of strategy at Netcracker, said many operators have started to virtualize some of the functions in their networks, but now the focus is turning to provisioning the service and making money. Netcracker will leverage its own OSS/BSS expertise as part of the new NaaS.

In related news, EXFO announced it has integrated its virtualized service assurance with NEC/Netcracker.