Six Service Providers Champion the TM Forum Catalyst in Which NEC/Netcracker Demonstrates the Importance of Service Orchestration for Network Slicing

Nice, France — May 16, 2017 —

NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology announced today their participation in the 5G Service Operations: Closed Loop Assurance of 5G Network Slices Catalyst Project at TM Forum Live! 2017. The goal of the Catalyst is to fully explore operational technology readiness to enable 5G-based IoT services. Championing the project are six service providers: AT&T, BT, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telenor and Vodafone.

The TM Forum Live! 2017 event runs from May 15-18 in Nice, France.

The Catalyst project illustrates the industry-wide importance of progressing 5G service operations to enable both new services and revenue growth, including self-driving cars, smart cities, connected factories and transformational remote health care. NEC/Netcracker is at the forefront of ensuring that 5G operations can support the needs of new IoT services that require specific SLA characteristics enabled by end-to-end network slices. Due to the vast number of IoT services and devices, the process must also be fully automated.

NEC/Netcracker will showcase how Service Orchestration is the critical component in creating, managing and automating network slices across all network boundaries, including mobile, fixed, SDN and legacy networks.

"We are very excited to be a key participant," said Aloke Tusnial, CTO of SDN/NFV Business at Netcracker. "5G networks promise to open up new service opportunities for providers but the impact of 5G on service operations must be fully explored to make this happen. With NEC/Netcracker's Service Orchestration offering, a component of our Transport SDN Solution, we are helping the industry progress faster towards this goal."