French telecom Orange is taking AT&T's ECOMP platform for a trial spin in Poland as part of its virtualization strategy.
Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Ray Le Maistre spoke with Jehanne Savi, executive leader of Orange's All-IP & On-Demand Networks Programs, during this week's SDN World Congress event in The Hague. (See Orange Preps ECOMP Trial in Poland, Broadens AT&T Collaboration.)
Savi said that Orange Poland would be the first stop for testing AT&T's Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform. ECOMP is one attempt to bring law and order to the management and orchestration (MANO) sector, which is currently disjointed. AT&T designed ECOMP as the automation layer for its network software and virtual functions, tying both virtualized and legacy elements together.
"We're concerned about open source initiative fragmentation… Especially in the MANO domain, which is so sensitive. It is a key component in delivering agility," Savi told Le Maistre.
The ECOMP test in Poland is one of the first steps in the collaboration that AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Orange (NYSE: FTE) announced this past summer. (See Orange Takes AT&T's ECOMP on Test Drive.) In order to "test and learn" more about virtualization, Savi said that Orange planned on using its operations in 28 countries to check out various use cases.
ECOMP is attractive to Orange because it has been in production at AT&T for the past two years. It contains 8.5 million lines of code and AT&T announced plans to put it into the open source community by announcing it was working with the Linux Foundation . (See AT&T's Rice: ECOMP Reaches Critical Mass.)
For more on ECOMP, as well as the blossoming partnership between Orange and AT&T, tune into next Thursday's Telco Transformation radio show with Chris Rice, senior vice president of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T. (See AT&T's Chris Rice: Elements of ECOMP Defined.)
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation