CenturyLink, Deutsche Telekom, Reliance, and SK Telecom announced at Mobile World Congress the Next Generation Enterprise Network Alliance with the unfortunate acronym "Ngena."

The alliance plans to launch international network services for business customers in the first half of 2017. It's going to create a separate company called Ngena with independent management, subject to applicable merger control clearance.

Ngena will target multinational companies that want to purchase their global telecommunications services from a single source. The alliance partners will define unified service levels for the entire global grid, so instead of separate agreements in different countries, customers can be served by a single point of contact.

Ngena plans to offer a variety of services from the cloud, including international VPN functionality, application performance management, WAN/LAN management, security services, and platform APIs for adoption of industry-specific use cases.

Cisco will be Ngena’s technology partner, enabling members to share network assets with standardized interfaces. The alliance says it will benefit from software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud technology, and it will rely on the Ethernet protocol to ensure that the networks of different providers are compatible with one another.

The physical and virtual network assets will be managed through hubs in Europe, America, and Asia using automated provisioning. The initial four service providers have networks in the United States, Europe, India, and South Korea, but the partners anticipate more than 20 additional service providers will join Ngena.

With international coverage and network functions virtualization (NFV), Ngena will provide a global service catalogue to its alliance partners, so they can deliver services for enterprise customers and enable fast provisioning, even in remote places.

“We’re seeing data center interconnection becoming a key focus area to connect customer cloud solutions,” Axel Clauberg, VP and CTO with Deutsche Telekom, told SDxCentral at Mobile World Congress. “Another trend relevant to Ngena is the standardization within the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) that’s touching on lifecycle [service] orchestration (LSO).”