Press Release 01-22-2018

Bell's leadership in bringing open source ONAP into production enables innovative new offerings to customers faster and at lower cost

St. Louis - January 22, 2018 - Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies, today announced that Bell, Canada’s largest communications company, has successfully implemented the first network automation use case in production leveraging the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). As Bell’s strategic partner, Amdocs brings unparalleled ONAP expertise and DevOps scrum team agility and delivery capabilities with the goal of driving innovation faster and reducing the cost of building and operating the data center of the future.

With clear benefits such as a more elastic network and increased business agility to be gained from taking advantage of network functions virtualization (NFV), Bell is driving its network transformation by leveraging the ONAP-based network service orchestration (NSO) platform to introduce new services faster to its enterprise and consumer customers. This includes automating its data center tenant network provisioning on ONAP to automate the operations of its data centers. Bell is focused on providing its operations teams with tools to automate life cycle management of both physical and virtual network functions, incident management and service assurance.

Bell’s Network 3.0 transformation initiative includes technology, process and people, with a strong emphasis on advancing its DevOps journey. This involves building the team and talent to support a cross-organizational DevOps model and creating a culture of Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD). A tangible outcome of this approach is Bell’s development of software that serves as the foundation for ONAP Operations Manager (OOM), which helps simplify deployments, reduce footprint and enable continuous delivery. The software has been contributed to the open source ONAP community to help others embrace ONAP.

“Bell is leading the industry in implementing open source based on automation for NFV services,” said Petri Lyytikainen, Bell’s Vice President, Network Strategy, Services and Management. “Together with Amdocs, we are fostering a new partnership business model to realize the benefits of the ONAP open source community. We are co-developing on the ONAP platform, implementing services and operationalizing the platform using continuous integration and delivery methods to deliver services to market faster and meet the unique needs of Bell’s customers. Amdocs, one of the co-authors of the original ONAP code base, is in an excellent position to help Bell deliver network automation that supports NFV and SDN.”

“Open source ONAP and programmable network models are going to be competitive differentiators as networks become more fundamental to the future digital society. Service providers that embrace this disruption early with ONAP will be in a significantly stronger position as networks evolve to become completely elastic, agile and programmable,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President for Amdocs Technology. “First-mover advantage for ONAP will go to carriers that establish the vital building blocks by developing expertise in their organization around open source in networking and agile development and by smartly leveraging an open and rich eco-system.”

“We expect ONAP to be adopted as the industry standard for network automation built with SDN and NFV,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking and Orchestration at The Linux Foundation. “The project has been endorsed by top global carriers and a vendor eco-system representing more than half of all mobile subscribers. It’s also a clear proof-point that the open source path to standardization is the most viable solution to drive agility and automation, and carriers can start immediately with ONAP.”