PCCW Global, a provider of wholesale Internet backbone connectivity, today selected CENX's Cortx Service Orchestrator to allow self-service provisioning in its VPN and cloud offerings in the Asia-Pacific region. Customers will be able to scale their bandwidth connectivity and cloud data center resources by going to an online portal, which is integrated into PCCW’s OSS and BSS environments.

PCCW needed an approach that could synchronize actions across its carrier partners' networks.

“Our forte is cross-border traffic — if there’s a service provider in the Middle East who wants to connect with China, for example," Marc Halbfinger, CEO of PCCW, told SDxCentral at the GEN15 conference in Dallas.

Halbfinger said that, until now, PCCW’s interconnects “have been manual in nature, [but] we’re presenting an approach that would create internetworking across the SDN layer to automatically provision services across the infrastructure. We’ve been doing this internally since 2011. Now we’re going to be offering it outward by collapsing some OSS and BSS.”

CENX’s Cortx Service Orchestrator provides assurance for these services over multicarrier, multivendor networks. When service requests are initiated at the customer portal, Cortx Service Orchestrator automates the workflow required to satisfy the bandwidth and compute requirements. Once the service is turned up, the service provider and customer have visibility into the state of the service for real-time monitoring and assurance.

CENX, which started out in 2009 as Carrier Ethernet Neutral Exchange, began developing software to automate the processes of ordering, provisioning, monitoring, and assuring data connectivity. In 2012, CENX transformed into a software vendor and has since been branching into more services, including virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) and virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE).

“We’re not constrained to Ethernet-based services anymore," says Marie Fiala Timlin, CENX’s director of marketing. "The evolution is up the stack in terms of services. All the way up to Layer 7.”

CENX officials say they're on track to employ 200 by year's end.

In June, Ericsson said it was integrating CENX’s Cortx Service Orchestrator into its own Managed Services Delivery Platform.

“Using lifecycle orchestration (LSO) software to integrate the operations layer with SDN and NFV technology seems to be in high demand from service providers, and CENX is one of the few startups that has a product," says Scott Raynovich, SDxCentral’s in-house analyst. “This is a multibillion-dollar market, so there is a lot of opportunity for them.”