Overture today announced new members to Harmony, an ecosystem of hardware, software and services partners focused on accelerating service provider’s automation and network functions virtualization (NFV) initiatives at the metro service edge. The Harmony partner program creates an open environment essential to accelerate software-defined services. Working together, Harmony partners’ goals are to ensure that service providers can select among best of breed components and avoid single vendor proprietary systems, while accelerating deployments and minimizing project risks.

“It is encouraging to see the growing industry support for our multi-vendor ecosystem as we deliver network solutions that help accelerate service innovation based on virtualization and software-defined services,” said Overture President and CEO, Mike Aquino. “Our service provider customers continue to ask for open architectures, vendor cooperation, and open interfaces, and we are committed to each of these. We welcome the newest members to our Harmony program and greatly appreciate their collaboration.”

Each of the partnerships is being driven by real-world customer deployments. The newest members of the Harmony program are:

• Certes Networks. Certes Networks protects data in motion. Certes’ award-winning CryptoFlow™ Solutions safeguard data traffic in physical, virtual and Cloud environments, enabling secure connectivity over any network without compromising network or application performance. Companies around the world rely on encryption products from Certes to accelerate application deployment and secure critical data simply and easily.
• Infovista. InfoVista is the leading provider of planning, assurance and optimization software. Our solutions empower communications service providers to deliver high-performing and differentiated network services while cost-effectively planning, operating, optimizing and monetizing their network infrastructure. InfoVista’s combined expertise and technology innovations provide a new level of network intelligence, visibility and control.
• Kapsch CarrierCom. Kapsch CarrierCom is a leading global systems integrator in the telecoms world. With a “from lab-to-live” approach, our certified experts supported by a strong ecosystem of leading partners involved in NFV initiatives are thrilled to deliver the best of breed NFV solutions for our customers, even the most complex ones.
• Red Hat. Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source solutions, including Linux and OpenStack. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) open source solution for building and deploying cloud-enabled workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides an advanced platform for deploying in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

“Certes Networks is pleased to join Overture’s Harmony ecosystem and to partner with Overture to deliver practical implementations of NFV-based services,“ said Adam Boone, Chief Marketing Officer of Certes Networks. “Certes offers virtualized communications security functions that are essential for the new generation of software-defined services. We look forward to working with Overture to empower service providers to monetize these new services efficiently and profitably.”

These new additions join the initial members, announced in June, that include 6WIND, Aeroflex, Brocade, Dell, EnterpriseWeb, Intel, JDSU, Metaswitch Networks, Qosmos and Wind River. The Harmony partner ecosystem follows Overture’s recent announcements of the availability of three key elements of the Ensemble OSA: the Ensemble Service Orchestrator, Ensemble Network Controller and, most recently, the Overture 65vSE. Ensemble OSA™ is the industry’s first complete and open platform for service automation and network functions virtualization that is built specifically for the service provider metro edge.

In the coming months, Overture and the Harmony program partners will be participating in a number of public demonstrations, providing details of joint solutions and sharing news.