Ribbon: Providing CSPs with Comprehensive Cloud Coverage in All Environments

In today’s extremely competitive landscape, communications service providers (CSPs) are increasingly looking for ways to not only protect their existing customers and investments, but also grow their subscriber base in the most efficient and cost effective manner possible. More and more CSPs are looking to cloud economics to improve their bottom line and their ability to better serve their customers with improved services and enhanced offerings. Cloud-hosted solutions offer CSPs the ability to be more cost-efficient, more innovative and more responsive to changing customer demands.

At Ribbon, we have been delivering best-in-class technology solutions and service to our customers for decades, ranging from the smallest of independent operators to the largest tier one global service providers. With our long history of working with CSPs of all sizes and our deep knowledge of how they operate, we understand that different service providers will take different approaches to transitioning to cloud-hosted solutions.

That is why we have smartly designed our portfolio to support our customers, regardless of the path they choose - to migrate to public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or private clouds, which provide them with more control over their own environments. We are committed to bringing to market innovative solutions that will allow our customers to succeed in any environment.

For example, we have recently made a number of enhancements to our cloud portfolio including for our industry-leading Session Border Controller Software Edition (SBC SWe), which is available on AWS. The SBC SWe on AWS delivers increased performance, support for media transcoding using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), and ensures high availability and redundancy to meet the rapid failover times required for real-time communications in the cloud. Customers are already benefiting from the increased scalability that our SBC SWe is delivering on AWS.

We are integrating our solutions with Amazon Web Services’ Cloudwatch service, a monitoring and management service, that provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

We have also made our Policy and Routing (PSX) application available on AWS to deliver a comprehensive, coordinated policy & routing and secure session management solution. In addition, we are committed to supporting integration with open source software toolkits from industry leaders such as Red Hat and Terraform to optimize and automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment.

For CSPs who want to retain control and deployment of their core network functions, instead of deploying them in a public cloud, our comprehensive suite of OpenStack-based Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which include the SBC, PSX, Element Management System (EMS), and VNF Manager, offer seamless integration via a single solution to ensure successful private cloud deployments.

These VNFs have also been certified on Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform 13. Ribbon’s portfolio comes with the ability to seamlessly integrate with the broader Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) ecosystem technology by leveraging European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and Linux Foundation Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP)-based standardized VNF solutions. Our solutions deliver the ability to provide distributed SBC support for OpenStack and non-OpenStack-based software environments such as VMWare and KVM, which further expands our ability to deliver open sourced, non-proprietary solutions.

Ribbon is constantly collaborating with other ecosystem partners to enhance our abilities to deliver the latest in technology innovations to our customers as evidenced by our membership in the Linux Foundation and participation in projects including OPNFV, ONAP and OpenDaylight. We have demonstrated proven integration with third-party orchestrators to facilitate VNF lifecycle automation on a large scale.

These are just a few of the many examples of how Ribbon is continually investing in the software-based cloud solutions that our customer are seeking, regardless of their strategic migration approaches. We understand that our customers are looking to us and our partners to help them deliver the technologies that enable them gain the efficiencies of scale and agility they need to not only survive, but more importantly thrive in today’s digital world.