Adtran debuts Mosaic Open Network Alliance, sets focus on driving SD-Access adoption

Adtran has launched its Adtran Mosaic Open Network Alliance (Mosaic Alliance), providing industry stakeholders a forum for collaboration and integration as they move forward with implementing SDN for their last-mile networks. 

Although Adtran did not reveal which companies are participating yet, the vendor said initial members have already begun enrolling in the Mosaic Alliance and that the company is reviewing a large slate of additional prospective members.

Adtran said it will be announcing partners to the alliance over the coming months and continuously after that point.

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Tim Doiron, principal analyst of intelligent networking for ACG Research, told FierceTelecom that while the service providers’ movement towards virtualization provides offers agility, it can also raise complexity and the need for integration.

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Tim Doiron

“The value of this strategy is to bring together a flexible collection of vendor and service provider components to pre-integrate and work through interoperability issues,” Doiron said. “Groups like the Mosaic Alliance should help identify issues early and result in less time and effort for service providers prior to field deployment.”

Call for openness

This new alliance reflects the company’s stance as a proponent of open source, multi-vendor networks. Adtran has an affiliation with various open networks organizations and projects including NIA, ODL, ONF, ONOS, CORD and ON.LAB.

The company is also an active member of many of the access standards bodies such as the Broadband Forum and CableLabs.

“In the area of network virtualization, there is a lot of amazing industry collaboration happening across standards bodies like ETSI, IETF and Broadband forum as well as open source communities like CORD, ONOS and OPNFV,” Doiron said. “I think the real benefit of the Mosaic Alliance is to build upon the progress these organizations and assemble an on-demand, mix-n-match, per-customer solution that can be tested and battle hardened throughout the whole life-cycle.”

Service providers can leverage the Mosaic Alliance to create their tailored multi-vendor SD-Access platforms.

The Mosaic Alliance brings together market participants that are focused on demonstrating and testing open and proven SDN and NFV solutions. Adtran claims the Mosaic Alliance will save service providers the time and resources required to assess and substantiate vendors and offerings best suited for their open network demands while reducing introduction risks posed to the operator’s business.

Alliance members will have access to Adtran’s expertise and to one another for information exchange as well as mutual assistance for the development of new open SD-Access projects. Members will have the opportunity to meet, share insights and gain knowledge of the latest advancements impacting the industry.

The Mosaic Alliance offers two levels of engagement: 

Integration Members: This includes two sub-levels of members who integrate with or work within the Mosaic framework: Technology Partners and Collaboration Members.

Technology Partners are focused on delivering innovative programmable network functions whether open software or open hardware-based, while Service Partners are focused on delivering managed services, system integration, and other network operation requirements. 

Collaboration Members: This group provides an entry point for joint innovation, collaboration, insight and knowledge sharing.

While Adtran is not alone in developing a program like the Mosaic, Doiron said that such programs will help service providers in driving virtualization across what will be a multi-vendor and multi-domain environment.

“The majority of these programs are stimulated by vendors that are providing SDN control and management and network orchestration (MANO) software – companies like Ciena with the Blue Orbit Ecosystem and Adva with the Ensemble Harmony Ecosystem,” Doiron said. “The rationale is that software vendor products like Adtran Mosaic are critical to enabling service provider digital transformation and must be able to instantiation, manage and control their own network functions and microservices as well as those of other vendors and third parties.”

Boosting services profile

By creating this new alliance, Adtran could potentially make itself more valuable to service provider customers like Australia’s nbn that are looking for and want more open network systems as they transition their last-mile network infrastructure to an SD-Access architecture.

The vendor won a wide-reaching deal with nbn that spans software, hardware and services, which includes commitments from both companies to support the ongoing nationwide network rollout. As part of the work with nbn, Adtran is implementing a multi-vendor DPU management solution, using an open microservices architecture.

Additionally, the new alliance could also help Adtran further advance revenues inside its burgeoning services business. During the second quarter, the service provider reported that services revenues were $29.1 million, up $24 million from the same period a year ago.

This article was updated on Aug. 30 with additional industry analyst color.