Comcast Business said Wednesday it has agreed to purchase Plano, Texas-based Masergy, a maker of software-defined networking and cloud platforms for global business, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is in line with Comcast Business’s efforts to increase its reach in large and mid-sized companies, particularly U.S.-based organizations with multi-site global operations.  

“Masergy provides a perfect complement to our portfolio of enterprise services and solutions and will allow us to instantly and dramatically amplify our growth in the global enterprise market,” Comcast Business president Bill Stemper said in a press release. “We’re excited to welcome Masergy’s employees and leadership to Comcast Business as we bring continued innovation and superior experience to our customers.” 

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According to Comcast, Masergy has more than 1,400 customers in nearly 100 countries and the combination of Comcast Business’s fiber network and Masergy’s services will enable Comcast Business customers to manage their international operations and networks more efficiently and securely.

“On behalf of everyone at Masergy, we are thrilled to join the Comcast Business family and are extremely excited for the next chapter of Masergy,” Masergy chairman and CEO Chris MacFarland said in a press release. “We are confident that together we can significantly enhance our service offerings to businesses of all sizes in their journey to the cloud.”

Lumina Networks, a spin-off company focused on the open source, software-defined networking sector, said it has closed a $10 million Series A round that included $8 million in new funding led by Verizon Ventures.

AT&T and Rahi Systems are new investors that participated in the round, the company said.

Lumina Networks, spun-off from Brocade in August 2017, said it will use the funds for new product development centered on its OpenDaylight-powered SDN controller, and to spur expansions into Europe and Japan.

Lumina, which is focused on a market that aims to move away from proprietary purpose-built networking hardware to off-the-shelf hardware driven by software, said the A round comes after network operator deployments in the first nine months of operations, with revenues more than double their pre-spin-off levels.

"This investment by both Verizon and AT&T demonstrates the strategic importance of open source networking to the automation and digitization of their networks," Andrew Coward, founder and CEO of Lumina Networks, said in a statement. "We understand the value of our mission to take open source networking out of the labs of our customers and into production deployment. This funding will enable us to reach a wider customer base and realize the industry vision of easily deployable open source software-defined networking (SDN)."

Open source is “instrumental to Verizon’s digital transformation,” added Alexander Khalin, director of Verizon Ventures.

"SDN is at the heart of our network transformation, and we've committed to virtualizing and software-controlling 75% of our core network functions by 2020," added Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs, Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design. 

Looking to expand its opportunities in the commercial services sector, Comcast Business this week launched ActiveCore, a software-defined networking platform that, it says, will help its customers manage their networks across multiple locations while keeping costs in check.

Comcast Business is billing it as the first “cable-delivered, gig-ready SDN platform in the country, and said Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), an alternative to multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) running over T1 lines, is the first business product powered by its ActiveCore platform.

As an SDN approach, ActiveCore delivers services and changes in software, rather than relying on purpose-built hardware. Comcast Business said ActiveCore can be paired with the operator’s new DOCSIS 3.1-based gigabit broadband service, which has been launched in the company’s Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic and Central regions, and will reach Comcast’s full service area by the end of 2017.

RELATED: Comcast Rolls DOCSIS 3.1 to More Businesses

Early SD-WAN customers include Jim Ellis Automotive Group in Atlanta, Ga., which operates 15 locations across the state with more than 1,000 employees, Comcast Business said.

Comcast Business is adding ActiveCore as it looks for more ways to stoke unit of the company that is already growing and seeking ways to move up-market and serve enterprise customers that operate in multiple locations. Comcast generated $1.5 billion in business services revenues in Q2, up 12.6% year-on-year, though much of it is still tied to small business customers.

RELATED: Comcast Business Bows New Unit Targeting Fortune 1000

“ActiveCore and SD-WAN represent a ‘generational moment’ for our industry and are designed for businesses that embrace the consumerization of IT, SaaS and cloud services to run their enterprise operations,” Kevin O’Toole, senior vice president of Product Management for Comcast Business, said in a statement. “We now offer enterprises a robust, future-proof alternative to legacy MPLS solutions; allowing them to easily add capacity to branch offices at scale and unlock the potential of virtualized networks for today’s connected economy.”

Comcast also released this video promo about ActiveCore:

Offering a way for cable operators to migrate to a more efficient, virtualized platform, Calix has introduced a product that can plug into their legacy access networks and utilize software-defined capabilities.

Calix said that product, the AXOS DPx Connector, is a DOCSIS Virtualized Network Function (VNF) that can be woven into existing OSS (operational support systems) for HFC and PON networks deployed by MSOs.

Cable operators are eager to shift to software-defined networking and virtualized apps and systems, but they are challenged with how to develop a framework that can fit that into those legacy OSS environments, Shane Eleniak, vice president of product line leadership at Calix, said.

Calix has already done some work with DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON and DOCSIS Provisioning of GPON, which enable operators to utilize their DOCSIS backoffice systems for PON deployments, but want to move away from a classic, monolithic software approach, he said.

MSOs, Eleniak added, “want to invest in something that is SDN-aware…The tricky part for an operator, is how do I bridge?”

Calix claims that the AXOS DPx Connector can be plugged into the existing architecture and virtualize the applications without altering the underlying backoffice systems. MSOs would also use the same servers, but the new connector would add scale and tie it back to a data center or network operation center (NOC).

To aid the effort, Calix has teamed up with Momentum Telecom, a company that supplies DOCSIS management/provisioning products and hosted voice services to cable operators.

Eleniak said the primary, early targets for the new product are cable operators that have been deploying PON or have it on their roadmap for certain scenarios in a way that complements the HFC side of their business. He said it will also fit in as operators deploy DOCSIS 3.1 and starting to pursue “virtual” Converged Cable Access Platforms (CCAPs) and distributed access architectures.

Calix said it has field trials underway. It will be using a two-pronged approach for trials and deployments – working with Momentum and its base of MSOs as well as direct engagements with the operators, according to Doug Blue, Calix's solutions marketing director for cable. 

 “As an industry, we know that SDN is the way of the future of service providers and this partnership between Calix and Momentum Telecom will allow our customers to more easily move to an SDN architecture as soon as they are ready,” Scott Helms, senior vice president of advanced services at Momentum Telecom, said in a statement. “The service agility enabled by SDN has become a key strategic goal for cable operators, and the combined solution allows our joint customers to immediately begin to reap the benefits of an SDA architecture without the complexity of high costs of integration.“  

Cisco Systems plans to cut up to 14,000 jobs, or 20% of its global workforce, in the “next few weeks,” CRN reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources close to the company.

Cisco’s been asked to comment on the report, but CRN said the company has already offered early retirement packages to employees.

Update: Cisco declined to comment.

CRN said the cuts will range from 9,000 to 14,000 employees, and will come as Cisco shifts its focus and skillset to support the move toward more virtualized, software-defined networks and away from purpose-built hardware.

Cisco is scheduled to post fiscal Q4 results Wednesday (August 17). The company, which sold its CPE business to Technicolor in late 2015, posted Q3 revenues of $12 billion, up 3% year-on-year, and said it expects Q4 revenue growth of up to 3%.

Cisco, helmed by CEO Chuck Robbins since July 2015, announced it would cut 6,000 jobs, or 8% of its global workforce, in August 2014, a year after the company laid off about 4,000 workers.

Earlier this year, Cisco expanded its service provider organization amid a broader reorganization.

With twosessions dedicated to it here today at INTX, network virtualization is a hot topic for service providers and their array of vendors.

Kyrio, the recently rebranded CableLabs for-profit spin-off, has also been taking aim at network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN) in the form a new interoperability lab based at the organization’s Louisville, Colo., and Sunnyvale, Calif., facilities.

Multichannel News recently caught up with Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs, and Mitch Ashley, president and general manager of Kyrio, to learn more about Kyrio and the aims and plans for the new lab and why they think it will be important not just to cable, but to other industries as well.

Multichannel News: In February you rebranded your for-profit NetworkFX subsidiary as Kyrio as it pursued areas like wireless roaming and WiFi testing.  And recently you announced that it will open an SDN]/NFV interoperability lab. Can you offer a bit more detail on the goals of that new effort?

Mitch Ashley: Kyrio is a wholly owned subsidiary of CableLabs and what we're doing is building off the phenomenal technology transfer model that CableLabs has had for the cable industry of creating technologies and innovations that show up in vendor products and show up in cable operator networks and in customer homes. 

NetworkFX (the former brand of the Kyrio spin-off) was started originally around taking the PKI (public key infrastructure) service that CableLabs had done for the entire cable industry -- coming up on over 500 million security keys for devices like cable modems, CableCARDs... That sort of proved out the model for Kyrio. In January we announced the rebranding of the company but also that we were expanding into other lines of business, like wireless testing. 

[For the NFV/SDN lab], we're providing a vendor-neutral laboratory environment where hardware manufacturers, software providers and even chip manufacturers can come in. Much like we do with cable modems and other technologies, now we can interoperable with each other and go through test deployment scenarios, do basic testing across devices in a friendly environment where they know that the confidentiality of their information is maintained. What we focused on was how do we help those vendors get their products to market in a mutli-vendor environment. 

It's pretty difficult for one manufacture to get the bevy of SDN and NFV devices into their labs to do testing with. We provide that platform, where they can maintain an ongoing presence in our interop lab or do some remote testing. And we'll do hosted events -- like the OPNFV interop...on May 9. 

We can also provide remote access to both hardware and software manufacturers and provide new builds and loads onto their equipment and test that across multiple hardware manufacturers and software solutions.

Phil McKinney:  The SDN and NFV worlds are moving fast. We see it having a great opportunity to have an impact on the MSOs but the overall cost of network infrastructure and encourage the vendors to...move quickly. That's why we brought that expertise and opened it up to anybody and everybody not related or tied to cable operators.

MCN: Will there be a qualification stamp that comes out of this like CableLabs does with DOCSIS? 

PM: Even on the cable side when we do an interop, there's no certification or stamp. Anything that happens inside the interop, stays inside the interop. But there are still some gaps in the NFV world around interoperability. They can get access to a set of configurations that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in order to do a better job of bringing the entire industry together. The focus, step one, is just on interoperability.

MCN: How would you characterize the cable industry's work with SDN and NFV with respect to competing industries? Are they in lock-step, ahead of the curve, behind the pack? 

PM: I can tell you that most of the major MSOs are keenly interested in taking advantage of the SDN and NFV worlds. The main driver there is can you speed up the process of deploying new products and new services.

The bigger operators are very involved in SDN and NFV; they are all having discussions with their vendor suppliers. Many of them have their own labs set up. Some are doing deployments...but it's in the early days. That's why I think there's so much excitement about the interop labs.

In this case, we're trying to bring everyone along together and it actually shortens the timeframe of going from, this is a nice concept, one in which I can actually commercially deploy this in a broad-based format. 

As the information-driven and connected world has evolved, and the cloud has proliferated, customer expectations have become more demanding and immediate. The movement of commerce and customer support into the digital realm has also put pressure on the industry as a whole, changing the way business gets done.

Service Providers (SPs) have found themselves at a crossroads. Many are turning to Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to fundamentally transform the economics of their business.

As these transformations take place, there are three things SPs need to know about the changing market and what they can do to adapt.

(1) Agility Is Key

Over-the-top (OTT) providers and other more nimble SPs are leading the way in this new era of immediacy with cloud and virtualization technologies that give them more agility and a better way to address the market’s demands for instant fulfillment. These providers are striving to, first, rapidly roll out new and customized services almost instantaneously to address anticipated — or in some cases, unanticipated — customer needs. When done in an environment where they can leverage automation, this can be accomplished in such a way to keep a tight lid on operational costs. Finally, leveraging an open environment with strong partners is critical to ensuring the flexibility to manage their risks and options in this multi-year evolution.

These technologies are very “forgiving.” Since the service investment is more closely aligned with the expected revenue, if a new service doesn’t take off, providers can “fail fast,” rapidly scaling down and redeploying assets without missing a beat. But if the new service is a success, they can “scale fast” to quickly capture maximum value.

As a result, “value” migrates to rapid service innovation with plain old network connectivity increasingly becoming a commodity. Providers who follow this new approach will meet the needs of their existing customers quickly and efficiently, reduce operational costs and reduce the financial and operational risk on their organization.

The simple truth is that SPs need to adopt this new mindset, and for many, the right technology partner will power their ability to do so.

(2) The Automation Imperative

While quickly harnessing the capabilities mentioned above to capitalize on innovative ideas is the future, successfully implementing them is another story. SPs are burdened by costly planning and development cycles that don’t match the pace of today’s escalating requirements. Most service and network infrastructures are designed and deployed in a rigid, manual, step-change fashion that can take from 12 to 18 months to roll out, require large upfront investments and are difficult to modify midcourse or after completion.

It’s no surprise, then, that service providers take a risk-averse approach to service development — these large investments of time and money aren’t recoverable if the market changes or demand does not materialize.

But market demands, combined with this approach, have created an innovation gap between customer expectations and what network providers can realistically deliver. Many application vendors have eagerly filled this void, ironically by using existing SP networks for connectivity to deploy their services.

There are a few systemic reasons behind this innovation gap, including legacy environments based on complex manual workflows, which limit speed and increase cost; and the use of a fixed physical infrastructure that requires stringent testing and time-consuming modifications. Finally, SPs have limited network intelligence and visibility, precluding them from fully leveraging the information running through their networks.

More nimble SPs are automating and virtualizing their environments not just to reduce operational expenses but to rapidly iterate and test new services; then, depending on the success of the service, these providers decide whether to scale or “fast-fail.” The contrast is striking.

While network providers — constrained by a lack of experience with new technologies, as well as an operational structure and culture that evolved for a different marketplace—take months or years to identify a new service and source the technology to address it, companies that grew up on the web embrace DevOps environments, resulting in more agile service creation.

Again, partnering with a technology provider who already possesses these capabilities can jumpstart or augment an SP initiative.

(3) Future Proof With a Physical-Virtual Infrastructure

For SPs that remain mired in the old approach, the gap will only widen; they will be further marginalized and, as pricing pressures intensify, their already dwindling profits will continue to erode. At the same time, they must continue to invest in connectivity to deliver existing services or risk getting blamed for poor customer experience. It is truly a quandary.

Network providers need to take a different approach. The current network investment cycle is slow, with investments made in advance of demand; the new network model, on the other hand, is responsive to demand and keeps its options open. In order to advance with agility in today’s market, network providers need to adopt a carrier-grade, open network platform — one that accelerates delivery cycles and reduces operational and upfront expenses while minimizing risk.

This evolution requires software-driven workflow automation that strengthens and streamlines service delivery. Workflow and systems automation not only reduces operational expenses, it allows customized services to iterate quickly — moving from concept to testing in a matter of days rather than months, and with a smaller cost footprint designed to match expected revenue.

Such an approach requires a mix of physical and virtual infrastructure that optimizes investments while dynamically changing the network to meet service needs. Virtualization enables variable cost business models, which means lower up-front costs and lower risk. While dedicated boxes can deliver better price-performance and higher potential margins, they also come at a premium; the higher fixed-cost model means higher risk — especially when demand is uncertain and customer needs are dynamic. Smart providers follow a simple rule of thumb: virtual for flexibility and options; physical for efficient scalability.

The bottom line is that today’s SPs can compete and win when they pivot their businesses to quickly develop new services, implement greater efficiencies and reduce risk. Strong technology partnerships that allow SPs to take advantage of breakthroughs such as SDN and NFV to run across and build upon legacy systems are key for rapidly adapting to customers’ changing demands.

And ultimately, the answers to ongoing questions about which direction to take in a changing market will come from data. Indeed, network analytics can be used to predict where the market is going and anticipate what your customers need before they even know it themselves. This unique and direct connection to customers is a distinct competitive advantage that allows innovative SPs to eclipse what their competitors are delivering and thrive in our changing economy.

Paul Obsitnik, is vice president of service provider portfolio marketing at Juniper Networks This contributed article is based on awhite paperpublished by the company.

Representing the next step in the evolution of DOCSIS-powered cable broadband networks, CableLabs recently released a new family of specs that cover a range of “distributed” architectures for the Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), a high-density system that combines the functions of the cable modem termination system and the edge QAM and will play a key role in the industry’s all-IP transition.

The new distributed architectures, which expand on today’s more centralized deployments,  will provide “significant scale advantages and flexible deployment options supporting…both DOCSIS 3.0 and DOCSIS 3.1 networks,” Karthik Sundaresan, a principal architect at CableLabs, explained in this blog post about the new specifications, which aim to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability.

The distributed approach, Sundaresan wrote, fits with the software-defined networking (SDN) and networks functions virtualization (NFV) initiatives operators are pursuing, and will run parallel to a wide range of wireless infrastructure architectures.

He noted that distributed DOCSIS deployments are already underway in some markets that use  C-DOCSIS, a modified approach that was originally developed for China’s cable market that has since been formally integrated with CableLabs’s broader DOCSIS initiatives.

CableLabs, Sundaresan explained, is specifying several different Distributed CCAP Architectures (including Remote PHY and Remote MAC-PHY) and will release the set of technical reports and specifications throughout this summer.

The specs will apply to DOCSIS and CCAP vendors such as Arris, Cisco Systems, Casa Systems, Harmonic and Huawei, as well as Gainspeed, a startup that is developing a “virtual” CCAP.

CableLabs issued the Remote PHY family of specifications last month (the technology is covered via six specs and one technical report describing the overall architecture). Labeled as “MHAv2,’ they represent an evolution of the original Modular Headend Architecture specifications.

Remote PHY  paves the way for an integrated CCAP to be separated into two components -- the CCAP Core and the Remote PHY Device (RPD) – along with an interface that weaves them together using “pseudowires.”  

A common location for an RPD, which contains elements such as the downstream QAM and OFDM modulators, upstream QAM and OFDM demodulators, is the optical node, located at the junction of the fiber and coax plants, Sundaresan wrote.

Sundaresan said vendors have begun architecting ASIC designs, device platforms and software to implement the RPD and CCAP-Core devices. The specs for the OSS that will manage the devices are under development and will be released this summer.

Comcast has become the first service provider to join the OpenDaylight Project, an open source platform for software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies aimed at building more automation and programmability into the network.

OpenDaylight also announced that Lenovo has become a member of the initiative.

“We have been testing ODL since the project launched to see where it might fit in and have been impressed by the improvements in functionality and stability with each successive release,” Chris Luke, senior principal engineer at Comcast, noted in this blog post about the MSO’s involvement. “We have also been participating with our partner CableLabs on the OpenDaylight sub-project PacketCable PCMM, which aims to develop a southbound plugin for ODL that can manage service flows across Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) devices.”

“With an ever-growing number of endpoints to manage, evolving our SDN and NFV capabilities becomes increasingly important,” said Rakesh Puri, executive director of network applications and systems at Comcast, in a separate statement.

Comcast, Luke emphasized in the blog, is motivated to reduce the operational complexity of its networks, noting that the near-term work involves making improvements to network automation under the operator’s Programmable Network Platform, a framework that outlines a stack of behaviors and abstraction layers that software uses to interact with the network.

“It is our hope that by harmonizing on a common framework and useful abstractions, more application groups within the company will be able to make use of better intelligence and more easily interact with the network,” noted Luke, who is also part of an OpenDaylight Advisory Group formed to provide technical and strategic guidance to the ODL community on the challenges of running real-world networks. “Longer term, we’re working toward creating an architecture where the core of the network is not intimately involved in the operation of virtual networks.” 

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) – technologies that are playing an important role in the evolution of telco networks and rapidly becoming a point of emphasis for cable, is going to be a huge business, according to a new forecast from Infonetics Research.

The carrier market for SDN and NFV will reach $11 billion by 2018, Infonetics said in a report that takes a deep dive on SDN router and switch hardware and software and NFV-facing elements, such as policy, deep packet inspection, and security.

"For three years, the telecom industry has been abuzz over SDN and NFV, with anticipation and hard work developing the vision, goals, architectures, use cases, proof-of-concept projects, field trials, and even some commercial deployments. We've been gathering data in this early market for nearly two years and are projecting the global service provider SDN and NFV market to reach $11 billion in 2018,"  Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks, said in a statement.

Infonetics is breaking down spending in the emerging market into new SDN and NFV software, which it expects to comprise 20% of the total SDN and NFV market in 2018, as well as “displaced” revenue (12% by 2018) that comes from purchases other than traditional network hardware such as routers and firewalls. The third revenue segment – predicted to be the largest (68% by 2018) will come from “newly identified segments of existing markets,” which mostly includes virtualized network functions (VNFs), as well as ports on routers, switches, and optical gear that have become SDN-capable.

The march toward more software-defined networks will produce an ever-mounting pile of hard dollars for the world's suppliers of telecom and datacom network products. According to Infonetics Research, a cumulative $1 trillion will be spent on telecom and data equipment and software over the next five years.

"Despite the fact that enterprises and service providers are in the middle of massive network upheavals due to the evolution of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technology, the telecom and datacom networking equipment and software market is on track to grow annually through 2018 with the fastest growth coming in 2015," said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst at Infonetics Research, in a statement.

Worldwide, sales of telecom and datacom equipment and software hit $183 billion in 2013, up 3% from the prior year.

Based on global revenue, Cisco Systems continues to lead the telecom and datacom network equipment and software market with 19%, followed by Huawei, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and ZTE – the same top five as the year prior, just in a slightly different order.

"Looking at just the service provider equipment space, we're seeing a shakeup in vendor market share, with Huawei leapfrogging longtime number-one Ericsson to take the top spot in 2013. While Huawei's been doing well in a number of regions, China's economy is a key factor keeping Huawei's growth so strong,” said Michael Howard, an Infonetics co-founder and  the co-author of the report.