Telco Systems: “SDN, NFV will be Key to our Future Growth”

With its innovative CloudMetro virtualization platform and NFV CyberGuard solution – Telco Systems is helping telecom operators and CSPs embrace the best of NFV, SDN and vCPE. The company is looking forward to become a significant player in this emerging market space.

Ariel Efrati, CEO of Telco Systems, spoke with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com during the recent CommunicAsia 2016 event in Singapore.

What is Telco Systems core technology?

Our primary focus is in the access space. We offer a broad portfolio of advanced carrier Ethernet, IP, demarcation and aggregation products and solutions.

Our solutions involve customer equipment and reach out to aggregation points and give connectivity to the edge of the network core. In addition, we have a lot of new innovations in NFV and SDN, which are enabling the virtualization of network functions.

What are some of the big innovations that Telco Systems is bringing to the market today?

As a company, we maintain an innovative organizational culture that generates new ideas and products that help our customers. Just over two years ago, we took the strategic decisions to begin developing solutions to help service providers better use SDN and NFV networking technologies. The benefits of these technologies are widely known and certainly justified.

One of these new innovations is our CloudMetro vCPE product line. CloudMetro can virtualize what are now device-based network functions, which service providers can in turn deliver to their business customers as new services. We offer Cloud Metro in two different versions: CloudMetro 100 supports 10GE and CloudMetro supports 1GE.

Another recent innovation of ours is the NFV CyberGuard solution. NFV CyberGuard is a rather unique cybersecurity solution for SDN and NFV networks. While SDN and NFV have a lot of benefits, at the same time, they also introduce a new set of challenges, some of which expose service providers to a range of cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

NFV CyberGuard addresses these inherent vulnerabilities and we are probably one of the only vendors that can address these security issues, which is becoming more of a concern for service providers looking to adopt NFV and SDN.

So when operators are looking at Virtualized Services – how are you as an organization helping them achieve that?

Well, CloudMetro is the starting point for a service provider to begin offering virtualized services. CloudMetro sits at the edge of networks – so it’s closer to the customer premises. The reason we do that is that there are some functions that actually cannot be virtualised at the network core.

Along with CloudMetro we have a full application library of virtualized network functions. We call these TelcoApps. Examples of network functions that we have turned into virtualized applications include firewalls, routing, session border control and caching.

A service provider can run these TelcoApps from CloudMetro in order to offer its business customers new virtualized IT management and security services. These virtualized services are a great source of new revenue streams for the service provider and can help keep existing business customers loyal.

We are continuously expanding our library of VNF applications. We are working with leading vendors like Check Point, Audio Codes, Palo Alto Networks and Netrounds. We have also recently tested additional VNF applications with additional vendors, including Cisco, Brocade, Juniper, Silver Peak, Riverbed and Fortinet.

How do you look at the Indian market today?

The Indian market is very interesting to us. India is a huge market and there are a lot of existing networking issues related to connectivity and capacity that we can help resolve. It is exciting to work with service providers in India as most executives are open to new ideas and innovations.

Do you plan to have your own office in India anytime soon?

We have embarked on many activities in India recently. We work with several local representatives in many regions around the country. We currently have several PoCs going on in India with a number of telcos.

Much of focus is on our carrier Ethernet solutions and expanding network capacity. We also have some sales activities in process in the government sector. These are long processes, although we have good expectations that business will result from these activities.

Moving forward, where do you think your future growth will come from?

We are moving more and more into virtualization. Carrier Ethernet is still a strong component of our core business, although I would say SDN and NFV will be key elements of our future growth. This is a general market trend too. With our strong experience and innovative product portfolio, we are in a good position to help service providers successfully make this transition.