Colt Technology Services, in conjunction with technology partners AT&T, Orange, Ciena, Amdocs and Fujitsu aims to bring the concept of the customer controlled and automated network closer to reality. 
According to Colt, through the demonstration of a number of MEF Forum LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) integration points, the breakthrough brings end customers one step closer to benefitting from a consistent experience in network provisioning no matter where customers want services delivered or through which network partner.
At present, long and expensive bilateral and proprietary implementation projects are currently necessary when two operators want to bring about a level of automated interaction between their networks. Moreover, once built the automation is not reusable.
“Colt sees the API requirement growing in importance as customers continue to demand greater control across multiple service domains, on-premise and remote, through their own orchestration platform. Our customer facing SDN API shows that we are committed to the goal of being part of a wider automation ecosystem that will allow our customers to really unleash the power of our network”, said Mirko Voltolini, Head Network on Demand, Colt.
The Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrates the feasibility of orchestrated, on demand, API-driven customer control of network, cloud and on-premise infrastructure from a single enterprise controller. This allows for finer cost control without compromising customer experience, even in environments with wildly fluctuating demand.
Colt and its technology partners will be demonstrating these MEF LSO integration points as part of the MEF17 Proof of Concept showcase.
This PoC is a real validation of the power of the first release of the LSO Sonata SDK (Software Development Kit), announced by the MEF in October 2017. The interface is a ground breaking standardised open API for automated real-time ordering and provisioning of SDN-based (Software Defined Networking) services between interconnected service providers, enabling interaction between different providers’ SDN architectures in near real-time.
Release 1 of the Sonata SDK, demonstrated in this PoC, covers address validation, serviceability and ordering use-cases between carriers and cloud providers.
In addition, Colt is demonstrating a production implementation of a customer facing SDN API allowing customers to take full autonomous control of their networks and integrate them into their wider service delivery platforms.
