Building on its roots in the orchestration and automation sector, UBiqube is moving into the telco cloud arena with a new interface that multiple vendors can use to upload their applications to an operator's telco cloud.
The 20-plus year old French private company got its start in the automation infrastructure business, Nabil Souli, CEO of UBiqube told Silverlinings during a recent call. “We were among the early innovators in that space,” the CEO claimed. “What we really developed or strengthened is the ability to go and tackle any back office, network operations center [NOC], security operations center, cloud infrastructure and automation challenges....”
The company's original software is the MSActivator orchestration framework, which is an orchestration service for automated operations in the enterprise infrastructure markets. NTT COMWARE has used MSActivator in both the enterprise and telecom markets.
“Lately, we have been engaging in a number of opportunities around telco cloud and the cloudification of telco technology,” the CEO said. UBiqube is working with operators like Telecom Malaysia and others, as well as vendor partners such as NEC and Tata Communications. “At the end of the day, the telcos are building a data center to host a lot of these new [virtual network functions]...provided to them by the vendors,” Souli said.
Souli noted that UBiqube is already providing the MSActivator orchestrator and automation engine in its wins in the telco cloud space. “It’s the same technology we’ve been using for years,” he noted.
In addition to its other telco customers, UBiqube is working with a Southeast Asian operator on a telco data center. Unfortunately, Souli wouldn't name that telco (and yes, we asked).
Clapping for cloud
The UBiqube CEO said that the company started to develop its newer CloudClapp product during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Our original intent was to basically target the enterprise market,” Souli said. UBiqube, however, released its CloudClapp visual cloud application deployment layer designed for hybrid clouds and integrated with its MSActivator product at Mobile World Congress this year. The combined CloudClapp and MSActivator product also enables cloud lifecycle management including security, compliance, cost and energy.
However, Souli said that UBiqube is going to go further with its telco cloud work.
"This particular [unnamed, Asian] telco ... the prototype we want to do with them in Q4 is it to give it a trial where we take CloudClapp — our second product, which is managing multiple clouds and helping folks deploy applications to multiple clouds — and customize it so that it looks like an interface they can give away to their suppliers and vendors," Souli said. “That’s the prototype we’re going to go after.”
This would be the single interface that telco peddlers would use to upload their applications to an operator's cloud. This will help operators who are trying to manage multiple suppliers in a telco cloud world.
Rivals for UBiqube include Amdocs and Netcracker in the telco cloud arena. Investors in the company are Fortinet, Fujitsu and NTT.
Souli said that UBiqube has been largely focused on the European and Asian market. He noted, however, that the company has just “gone back very recently and opened the U.S. again.”