Affirmed Networks now provides UnityCloud 5G Core offering on AWS environments

Affirmed Networks delivers UnityCloud 5G Core solution on AWS that allows Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to focus on delivering innovative services to their customers rather than on the operations of running a data center supporting a next-gen virtualized network.

Affirmed is now able to deliver effective, cloud-native 5GC network solution over the proven, robust AWS cloud services. As a result, operators can accelerate innovation and enhance their competitive advantage by delivering advanced services over a scalable 5G Core.

Affirmed UnityCloud is a web-scale, cloud-native 5G innovation platform that helps CSPs to quickly create and deploy new consumer, enterprise, and IoT services. With UnityCloud, operators can deploy new services in weeks versus months, which allows them to rapidly respond to market demands and compete more effectively. 

UnityCloud’s true microservice architecture enables automated fine-grained slicing so the solution can be tailored to the disparate needs of individual enterprises, applications, and use cases to support a wide range of new service offerings.

Affirmed UnityCloud improves network economics by converging ‘Any G,’ including 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, and wireline core on to one unified core.  This eliminates the need for CSPs to maintain parallel legacy networks and allows them to quickly create and deploy new consumer, enterprise, and IoT services.

The 5G core running on a trusted hybrid cloud such as AWS represents an ideal solution for operators. By leveraging Affirmed UnityCloud on AWS unique hybrid cloud, CSPs can now easily orchestrate the control and user plane. 

This allows them to centralize control plane by placing its workload in the AWS regional cloud, and distributing user planes by moving user planes closer to the user at the network or enterprise edge via AWS Outposts. As a result, CSPs gain the best user experience with the highest performance, ultra-low latencies, and lowest possible TCO.

This approach provides CSPs with the flexibility to design and deploy hybrid clouds in a wide variety of on-prem or public cloud-based models.  As a result, CSPs can accelerate innovation by providing developers with the same infrastructure, services, and APIs that will support the service when it is delivered. 

This enables CSPs to build an application once, and deploy via the cloud or on-premises, significantly decreasing the amount of custom software required, increasing developer velocity; eliminate custom environments that must be deployed, operated, and monitored, reducing operational complexity and risk; and access a vast ecosystem of AWS developers allowing the development of new compelling applications that will help monetize 5G investments.

As such, CSPs are able to reap the benefits of digital transformation by focusing on their core competencies. Operators also benefit from AWS’ global reach that allows them to expand into new markets and geographies to drive revenue growth without increasing complexity.

RingCentral and Avaya seal alliance to boost sales and partner network with RingCentral’s technology platform

RingCentral Inc. and Avaya Holdings announced closing of their early October alliance.

Avaya and RingCentral will introduce a new solution, Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral (Avaya Cloud Office), which will be the exclusive public Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution marketed and sold by Avaya.

Avaya Cloud Office combines RingCentral’s UCaaS platform with Avaya’s technology, services and migration capabilities to create a highly differentiated UCaaS offering. The companies expect to launch Avaya Cloud Office in the first quarter of next year.

RingCentral is contributing US$500 million to its partnership with Avaya, including a $125 million investment of 3 percent redeemable preferred equity that is convertible at $16 per share and an advance of $375 million primarily in stock for future payments and certain licensing rights.

In October, RingCentral had announced that it will enter into a commercial agreement with Avaya Holdings, thereby making it an exclusive provider of UCaaS solutions to Avaya. The vendors also decided to jointly develop programs to leverage Avaya’s global sales and partner network, as well as build automated technologies for seamless customer transition to RingCentral’s global UCaaS solution.

This collaboration will enable Avaya’s customers to leverage their existing investments, while reducing migration complexities and timeframes. Avaya Cloud Office is expected to provide an attractive total cost of ownership for Avaya customers and favorable compensation for Avaya and its partners.

“Our game-changing partnership with RingCentral and the introduction of Avaya Cloud Office have generated tremendous excitement with our partners and customers,” said Jim Chirico, Avaya president and CEO. “Avaya Cloud Office is a continuation of our stated strategy to be a cloud-first company, and we believe the addition of this UCaaS solution to our portfolio is a key differentiator that provides customers with a seamless journey to cloud communications.”

“As a leader in cloud communications, we’re laser-focused on bringing the power of the cloud to more enterprise customers,” said Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral founder, chairman and CEO. “With the growth of the mobile and distributed workforce, cloud communications solutions can deliver the capabilities enterprises need to effectively connect with customers, partners, and employees. This strategic partnership accelerates the transition of one of the world’s largest on-premise unified communications installed bases to the cloud.”

Fedora 31 generally available; begin push towards innovations around emerging IT use cases like IoT and Linux containers

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat Inc. sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, announced general availability of Fedora 31, the latest version of the fully open source Fedora operating system. Fedora 31 includes new features that help to address a host of modern computing challenges, from building and running cloud native applications to driving innovation in the connected world.

Each Fedora edition is designed to address specific use cases for modern developers and IT teams with Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server providing open operating systems built to meet the needs of forward-looking developers and server projects. 

Fedora 31 also sees the continued evolution of emerging Fedora editions, including Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue. Fedora 31 brings enhancements to all editions with updates to the common underlying packages, from bug fixes and performance tweaks to new versions. 

This release now includes updated compilers and languages, including NodeJS 12, Perl 5.30 and Golang 1.13. Additionally the "python" command will now refer to Python 3. It also provides support for Cgroupsv2, bringing kernel level support for the latest features and functionality around cgroups in the base packages of Fedora 31. This helps lay the foundation for improved performance and new capabilities in building and running containerized applications.

The new version offers switching RPM compression to ztsd, which decreases the amount of compression time needed and improves the overall performance of processes using binary RPMs; and comes with support for RPM 4.15, the latest version of the RPM Package Manager for enhanced performance and stability across all versions of Fedora.

Fedora 31 also includes key updates to Fedora’s desktop-focused edition, Fedora 31 Workstation. Fedora 31 Workstation provides new tools and features for general users as well as developers with the inclusion of GNOME 3.34. 

GNOME 3.34 brings significant performance enhancements which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora 31 Workstation also expands the default uses of Wayland, including allowing Firefox to run natively on Wayland under GNOME instead of the XWayland backend as with prior releases.

Additionally, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue continue to evolve and be updated to better meet the requirements of modern IT, which is powered by Linux containers, Kubernetes and cloud computing. The emerging Fedora editions remain available in preview.

Samsung and IBM now offer 5G and AI-powered mobile offerings on IBM Cloud for enterprises

Samsung Electronics and IBM announced at the Samsung Developer Conference, a new joint platform leveraging IBM Cloud and AI capabilities, and Samsung's mobile offerings. The collaboration between the two companies brings together IBM's capabilities with the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem for enterprise customers.

This announcement is designed to bring together IBM's cloud innovations and Samsung's Galaxy devices ecosystems, including Galaxy Tabs, Galaxy smartphones, and Galaxy Watches. This is aimed to help improve the work environments for police officers, firefighters and other first responders.

According to the International Labour Organization, nearly 3-million deaths occur each year due to occupational accidents. Governments and enterprises have an increasing need to build systems which track the health vitals of workers in remote or high-stress environments.

Built on the IBM Cloud, the new platform will now position clients to track a worker's vitals, including heart rate and physical activity, to determine if that person meets their definition of distress and dispatch help. 

For example, equipped with Samsung's Galaxy Watches with biometric sensors and Galaxy smartphones enabled with 5G capability, first responders will have their safety and wellness indicators shared on this platform in real time. 

The solution continually tracks their vital signs and other key indicators to instantly alert emergency managers if there is a change in any of these data points, which may indicate the responder may be in danger of a heart attack, heat exhaustion, or any other potentially life-threatening event requiring immediate attention. The platform transmits the data to emergency managers to provide insights for their decision-making.

On this new platform, Samsung reports that its high-speed Galaxy devices can now be used at scale almost anywhere. These devices can be customized to withstand intense environments, such as those encountered by a soldier in the field, power plant employees working in harsh weather conditions, an emergency worker responding to a disaster or a worker in a mining plant.

Currently being piloted by multiple police forces, this new solution provides real time health and situational awareness insights on first responders to reduce operational risks in the field.

Samsung's fit-for-purpose design approach and IBM Garage Methodology creates an open collaboration, accelerating how the two companies test and launch new business ideas with advanced cloud services. This approach integrates practices grounded in deep industry expertise at global scale through culture change into a single approach and driving enterprise design thinking.

The two companies are also collaborating across multiple industries to bring the power of IBM and Samsung to bear, including financial services, energy and healthcare. In addition, with the digitization of the manufacturing industry, this partnership lays the foundation for the automation of factories to become efficient and productive with advanced network services and 5G.

Developers can access and utilize the technology behind the platform and build further capabilities on top to impact other vertical industries like manufacturing, defense and retail.

"IBM continues to bring leading cloud and AI capabilities with deep industry expertise to our enterprise clients," said Martin Schroeter, senior vice president of global markets from IBM. "Together, IBM and Samsung will use the power of IBM Cloud, 5G, AI and edge computing to enable our clients to leverage these advanced technologies to have greater impact on the way people work, shop and protect their health and families."

"The mobile industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation and opening up new ways of business by bringing innovative technologies like 5G, AI and IoT to enterprises," said DJ Koh, President and CEO of IT & Mobile Communications Division, Samsung Electronics. "We believe open collaboration is central to unlocking these opportunities and look forward to driving digital transformation for our enterprise clients in the 5G era with IBM and Samsung's mobile devices and connected services." 

Frontier launches managed SD-WAN offering that eases the network digital transformation for enterprises

Frontier Communications announced Frontier Managed SD-WAN, its end-to-end, Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solution that provides WAN-wide visibility, agility, control and AWS Cloud integration. It also offers the enterprise customer a choice and puts them in control with either a fully managed or a co-managed model. 

Combined with SD-WAN Managed Private Network (SD-WAN EVPL), Frontier Managed SD-WAN is a powerful solution that simplifies network management operations, delivers enhanced service-levels (SLA) and offers a compelling alternative for enterprise customers looking to transition from complex, costly and static MPLS networks.

Through an intuitive user-friendly portal, the customer can implement WAN-wide configurations to reflect traffic conditions and business and application priorities. This feature alone puts the customer in control and results in the WAN delivering network performance and traffic optimization at the application level, based on the customer’s policy and priorities, all at the click of a mouse.

Frontier Managed SD-WAN supports all WAN underlay technologies, integrating seamlessly with traditional solutions. Its flexible, transport-agnostic design allows for a phased, at-your-own-pace migration without a large capex or downtime, while providing zero-touch provisioning for easy, agile network scaling.

The offering can be used for financial services by securing sensitive data with built-in protection measures and micro-segmentation of network traffic, while allowing remote access to protected information. For the manufacturing sector, it simplifies management and prioritization of network traffic, ensuring business-critical traffic has the best connection available.

The retail category allows organizations to get new stores up and running fast, providing smooth upgrade paths for future network additions and cloud migration of business-critical applications; while the entertainment sector prioritizes network activity for both critical and low-priority traffic, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

The education arena reduces IT costs while providing high-performing connectivity for students, administration and educators, enhancing online learning applications; and the healthcare segment provides full network visibility from a central location for WAN-wide control, prioritization, segmentation and control.

Featuring dynamic routing capability, Application Aware Routing (AAR) with 2000+ application signatures, Frontier’s Managed SD-WAN provides direct and secure access to the cloud as well as Frontier hardware redundancy to ensure network uptime and reliability. 

For enterprise customers, static network configurations have become too complex and unsustainable to meet the continued growth of cloud implementations and bandwidth demand driven by increasing mobile device use. The comprehensive new features of Frontier’s Managed SD-WAN address the needs of enterprise customers seeking to move to an agile digital networking model while maintaining security, performance, and resiliency.

With Frontier’s Managed SD-WAN, the customer can expect value from day one because the network will be fully visible; providing network insight including application bandwidth consumption, performance alerts, policy recommendations, business reporting and more. This powerful view enables the enterprise to make informed decisions based on actual data in near real-time.

Zensar Technologies releases whitepaper that reveals how IT management services can be used to boost customer loyalty

Zensar Technologies releases whitepaper that reveals how IT management services can improve customer loyalty and drive long term business success. 

Read more at this weblink.

Fortinet’s FortiGate 60F sets new benchmark for security compute ratings; boosts performance for integrated security and SD-WAN

Fortinet announced the FortiGate 60F Next-Generation Firewall, its latest desktop secure SD-WAN appliance. With over 1.5 million units sold worldwide, the FortiGate 60 series is the best-selling next-generation firewall and now includes Fortinet’s purpose-built system on a chip 4 (SOC4) security processor to achieve the highest Security Compute Ratings in the industry to support customers’ WAN edge transformation.

Digital innovation and rapid cloud adoption is changing the face of today’s business and has created significant challenges for organizations, such as poor user experience due to network bandwidth constraints and increased security risks with branches connected to the internet. 

Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) have emerged as the favored solution to solve these issues while also reducing the costs associated with MPLS connections. 

However, not all SD-WAN solutions have risen to the requirements of existing WAN edge. Many SD-WAN solutions on the market are incomplete and do not adequately provide the right performance, visibility, or security to ensure a secure connection and high quality of user experience.

To continue its focus on supporting enterprises’ WAN edge transformation and delivering Secure SD-WAN, Fortinet is announcing the latest next-generation firewall to include its patented SOC4 security processor - the FortiGate 60F. 

FortiGate 60F now consolidates SD-WAN, advanced routing, and advanced security capabilities into a single appliance that enables network leaders to deploy Secure SD-WAN, while reducing complexity by consolidating point products into a single offering. This allows high performance and improved user experience at an optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
 

To help customers maintain high quality user experience for their business critical traffic (be it SaaS, multi-cloud, or unified communications), FortiGate 60F delivers ideal application steering, giving visibility to all traffic (even if encrypted) without impacting performance and ensuring all critical applications are routed to their best path.
 

FortiGate 60F leverages Security-Driven Networking principals – powered by Fortinet’s patented SOC4 security processor – to deliver the fastest deep inspection of SSL/TLS encrypted traffic (including the industry’s first support for TLS 1.3) at 750Mbps, 11 times greater than the industry average. 

The FortiGate 60F offers comprehensive threat prevention with IPS, application control, and anti-malware at 700Mbps, four times greater than the industry average, to help customers protect their network without impacting performance.

Fortinet security processors radically increase the performance, scalability, and value of Fortinet solutions while greatly improving user experience and shrinking space and power requirements. Security Compute Rating is a benchmark that compares the performance of Fortinet’s purpose-built ASIC-based next-generation firewall appliance to other NGFW and SD-WAN vendors in that same price range that utilize generic CPUs for networking and security capabilities. 

“We hear from an increasing number of customers who are struggling to achieve the required level of user experience, visibility, and security at their WAN edge to support key business applications,” said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet. “With today’s introduction of the FortiGate 60F powered by our latest security processor, Fortinet continues its commitment to security innovation, setting industry records for performance to empower network leaders to truly transform their WAN edge.”