NEC and NetCracker Expand Partner Ecosystem with Commercially Ready NFV Solutions

NEC SDN Partner Space Supports New Revenue Growth Through the Monetization of Emerging Cloud, IoT and Other Market Opportunities

TOKYO, JAPAN and WALTHAM, MA - October 13, 2015 - NEC Corporation and NetCracker Technology announced today the expansion of the NEC SDN Partner Space, a highly successful partner program that includes more than 40 partners which have helped NEC to deliver cutting-edge SDN and NFV solutions to more than 250 system installations across the globe. The expanded ecosystem focuses on bringing new services and applications to market through commercially ready solutions. Together NEC and NetCracker bring a full range of networking, IT and professional services expertise to the ecosystem with a particular focus on operationalizing and monetizing homegrown and partner solutions for customers.

The NEC SDN Partner Space brings together leading innovators across the communications technology landscape to operationalize SDN and NFV. The new ecosystem portal, www.sdnspace.com, will be incorporating an SDN and NFV virtual labs environment that supports application testing with NEC's ProgrammableFlow SDN Controller, as well as NEC/NetCracker's Orchestration, vCPE, vEPC, and OSS/BSS systems, ensuring that all applications and services offered through the ecosystem can help customers accelerate time-to-market, reduce overhead and build new revenue streams and business models.

Through this expanded partner ecosystem, operators of all sizes can address the strong demand for a wide range of high-growth market opportunities, including smart cities, smart homes, IoT and cloud-based business and residential services, among others.

The NEC SDN Partner Space was announced in 2014 and has more than doubled in size in the past year due to the cooperation of major partners, including Intel, Juniper, Sandvine, Allot Networks, Kaspersky Lab, SanDisk and others. By bringing together commercially ready SDN and NFV solutions with a wide range of partners, NEC and NetCracker can help network operators and enterprises reduce the risk associated with service deployment and create more agile environments for driving new revenue growth.

"The NEC SDN Partner Space is groundbreaking in its ability to help both our enterprise and service provider customers operationalize SDN and NFV solutions, introducing new revenue growth opportunities and the ability to enable more agile operations," said Jiro Kitakaze, General Manager, Smart Networks Division, NEC Corporation. "We are excited to announce this expansion into NFV, which will bring about new capabilities in orchestration to empower even more functionality for our customers."

"Too often partner ecosystems are designed more for vendor marketing purposes than solving real business problems for customers," said Rahul Chandra, Vice President of Partner Development at NetCracker. "By focusing our ecosystem on the commercial and operational readiness of SDN and NFV-based applications, we are in an ideal position to help our customers become more competitive and capitalize on new market opportunities."