SDN

Cyan, an emerging software-defined networking and packet-optical transport platform vendor, saw its initial public offer of 8 million shares of common stock, priced at $11 per share, open at $10.05 this morning on the New York Stock Exchange.

The concept of software-defined networks (SDN) was all the rage at Mobile World Congress earlier this year in Barcelona, Spain, but efforts to virtualize the mobile network remain in a very nascent stage. Nonetheless, progress is coming fast and furious as customers increasingly push operators to find methods to open bandwidth or deploy applications on the fly.

Until recently, SDN and virtualization were not seriously considered for use in massive telecom networks, but that is rapidly changing. According to a recent report from Strategy Analytics, operators are virtualizing lower-layer network resources, especially for next generation 4G IMS networks that already separate the data and control planes as SDN does.

SDN is a new buzz word in the telecom and IT worlds, with promises of automation and enhanced service provisioning times. Yet despite its potential, the SDN concept comes with a number of challenges. Besides the lack of an industry standard, service providers and vendors need to figure out how to integrate SDN with existing OSS/BSS.

If one word could sum up the top priority at AT&T it would be broadband, from both a wireline and wireless perspective, according to Chuck Kalamek, vice president of research for AT&T Labs.

BTI Systems has beefed up its management team by hiring two telecom industry veterans, Eve Griliches and Jim Hintze, to head up new cloud and software-defined networking initiatives.