Sedona Systems is all about helping service providers “fully discover” their own networks, according to Sedona CTO Ori Gerstel, whom SDxCentral spoke to in late 2017. “It’s surprising how little some service providers truly understand their network.”

Sedona’s NetFusion technology provides an automated map of service provider networks as the first step in network automation and automated service provisioning.

“If you’re trying to automate data functions, you’ve got to make sure the network data is accurate,” said Gal Afriat, VP of product for Sedona Systems, during a recent webinar on SDxCentral. “The best way to get an accurate source of data is to go directly to the network."

For service providers, Sedona looks at the IP aggregation network, the IP core network, the metro optical network, and the long-haul optical network. In addition to these layers, the company maps multi-domains and multi-vendors. “The silent killer is if you have poor quality data,” said Afriat.

“The network itself is being run and managed as if it were composed out of completely different systems,” he said. “But the truth is: it’s a single network. At Sedona we combine all this information.”

Once Sedona maps all the network elements, it can help service providers assure their inventory. When they’re fulfilling an order, for instance, they know which ports are available. The data also helps them coordinate maintenance between IP and optical teams. And perhaps most importantly, it aids them in optimizing network performance.

“We have two major parts to our solution — one is looking down to fuse the IP and optical and make them work together,” said Gerstel. “The other part is northbound to help the orchestrator talk to the other parts of the ecosystem.”

For that, Sedona is working on its NetFusion software-defined networking (SDN) controller technology.

“We’re here for automation, not just analytics,” said Afriat. “Once you discover the IP and optical layer you can apply some analytics and automate the network itself. The focus is improving the traffic flow as a whole. But the Holy Grail is service automation. We want to affect the service level to use all this intelligence to deliver better services.”

Gerstel said NetFusion will be “a controller over others’ controllers.” Other vendors build their own controllers for both optical and IP layers. “We will sit on top of these SDN controllers and put the entire network together.”

Afriat explained on the webinar that the NetFusion service orchestrator can treat the network as a pool of resources it can control. And it knows for a fact that it’s working with accurate data. He said the most interesting part is that it can optimize the network for the specific needs of each service.

Gerstel said the company has raised about $20 million in funding.