CenturyLink taps Cyan to deliver NFV-based services to enterprise, SMB customers

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has taken another step forward with its software-based on-demand network plans by deploying Cyan's Blue Planet as its network functions virtualization (NFV) Orchestrator to deliver services to both its growing base of large enterprise and small to medium-sized business customers.

Cyan will provide CenturyLink orchestration for its Programmable Services Backbone (PSB), which provides a platform for the carrier to deliver virtualized services. Having this software-based functionality will enable CenturyLink to rapidly scale services to address customer demands while reducing service deployment times.

For this network initiative, CenturyLink will use Cyan's Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator to bridge multiple technologies to instantiate virtual network functions (VNF) from multiple vendors. Blue Planet will also be used to add virtual network functions to CenturyLink's network to provide software-enabled services and service coverage.

By supporting multi-vendor NFC Orchestration capabilities, Cyan said the Blue Planet software can instantiate and control virtual functions, coordinate with physical and virtual network resources and interconnect virtual functions (i.e., vFirewall, vDPI, vEPC, vRouter, vDNS) to achieve service chaining.

Deploying Cyan's Blue Planet is part of a broader initiative CenturyLink is taking to create a foundation to enable a customer to control more of the user experience.

Similar to its larger ILEC brother AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink has been an advocate of NFV and software-defined networking (SDN). It has built out NFV in 36 of its largest data centers in eight countries to enable a host of virtual CDN and CPE services.

"We are enabling virtual services such as virtual CDN, virtual load balancers and virtual CPE," CenturyLink CTO Aamir Hussain said in a previous interview with FierceTelecom. "It's all part of the same plan, but it needs to be offered from a single platform to the customer."

For more:
- see the release

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