Huawei chooses Skyfire for NFV video optimization

Chinese vendor Huawei has commenced a strategic partnership with Opera Software’s Skyfire unit to incorporate Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer cloud-based video QoE solution into its Cloud Edge Virtual Multi-Service Engine (vMSE).

Huawei launched Cloud Edge at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, positioning it as a groundbreaking NFVsolution. It forms part of a broader cloud and SDN roadmap for the next ten years called SoftCOM, which is intended to help operators navigate the evolution to a more virtualised infrastructure.

The kind of flexibility promised by NFV is considered to be especially useful when it comes to video streaming, which already accounts for the significant majority of mobile broadband traffic and can have dramatic and unpredictable spikes. Huawei reckons its partnership with Skyfire will improve its ability to help out with that.

“Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer solution is a great fit for our Cloud Edge platform, as it accounts for the two largest growing segments of mobile data consumption: audio and video,” said Jason Dai, President of Huawei CloudEdge.

“Both Huawei and Skyfire are established, cutting-edge leaders in NFV,” said Nitin Bhandari, CEO of Skyfire. “We look forward to collaborating with Huawei to help mobile operators embrace NFV in a simple way that also delivers the greatest return on investment.”

In other Chinese vendor NFV news, ZTE has had two of its top techies appointed to key positions in the new Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) group. Dick Chen, Principal Architect of SDN/NFV at ZTE, will join OPNFV’s board of directors, while Jun Zhang, Radio Network Architect at ZTE, will join OPNFV’s Technical Steering Committee.

“The advent of SDN and NFV has brought about the biggest shift in networking in the past 20 years,” said Margaret Chiosi, President of OPNFV. “To make the technologies successful, we need to collaborate to build a common foundation for the future of networks. We look forward to seeing ZTE take an active role in helping to make OPNFV and open source NFV successful.”