Verizon Business has broadened its universal CPE portfolio to include Cisco's ENCS white boxes in an effort to support new virtual services.
Cisco’s 5000 Series Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS) is now available in Verizon Business' Virtualized Network Services portfolio (VNS). For Verizon Business customers that prefer a Cisco ecosystem, ENCS is now included within Verizon's catalog of virtual network functions (VNFs) and service chains.
Verizon's VNS portfolio enables customers to replace their traditional network devices, such as routers, firewalls and switches, with VNFs that can be managed and orchestrated from a central location.
Historically, service providers have struggled with onboarding the various flavors of VNFs offered by vendors while vendors have complained that it's too costly and time consuming to create VNFs for each service provider. As a means to remove the friction around VNFs, OPNFV has aligned itself more closely with the Common NFVI Telco Taskforce (CNTT) to speed up the deployments of VNFs across service providers' NFVi environments through a verification program.
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In addition to being difficult to deploy, early commercial VNFs proved to be costly while network function virtualization (NFV) didn't live up to the potential that was outlined in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) first NFV white paper eight years ago.
Cisco's ENCS is a purpose-built platform for NFV. Working with a company such as Cisco allows Verizon to add more VNFs to its catalog without the onboarding hassles along with the ability to better manage the VNFs.
Working in tandem with NFV, the goal of using VNFs is to reduce the need for manual processes by enabling flexibility and agility into an organization. VNFs can also prioritize application availability on the fly and respond to changing business needs.
“Customers need to be able to quickly and easily deploy network services to branch locations as their business needs evolve,” said Verizon's Aamir Hussain, senior vice president of business products, in a statement. “The addition of Cisco’s ENCS compute platform to our VNS portfolio is another way for us to help enterprise customers simply deploy enterprise networking solutions for a more responsive, scalable and flexible network.”