After more than 13 years of selling Ethernet equipment to telcos, Overture Networks is diving into software, getting ready to sell orchestration and a controller for the metro network.
Yes, all networking vendors are becoming software-heavy in the face of software-defined networking (SDN). Some are even selling software that doesn’t have to be used with their own hardware, as Cyan is doing with its Blue Planet software.
Overture executives say they didn’t do this to follow SDN hype; it was more about facing reality. Service providers started demanding standards-based programming interfaces for their networks, and it became clear that the carrier central office would have to start behaving more like a cloud-hosting data center. So, Overture decided last year that its specialty in Carrier Ethernet equipment was going to need a stronger software element.
