As the telecommunication industry adopts NFV for mainstream deployment, service providers are demanding new capabilities for virtualization and management in both brownfield and greenfield architectures. In response, Overture today announced significant enhancements to its Ensemble architecture that will enable full realization of cloud, virtualization and software-driven services for revenue growth and cost reduction. Building upon three years of development and customer collaboration, Overture's Ensemble 2.0 features extend the life of existing physical network environments during the transition to fully virtualized service delivery.

"Our customers want truly open and pure-play NFV solutions that enable choice and prevent vendor lock-in. They also want a solution that connects seamlessly with their existing network infrastructure, enabling a pragmatic transition to network virtualization and delivering the choice, performance and agility required to make these new architectures profitable," said Mike Aquino, Overture president and chief executive officer. "Most importantly, these solutions must enable service providers to meet the performance demands and scaling challenges driven by the cloud and Internet of Things (IoT). Overture Ensemble 2.0 gives them exactly that."

Overture Ensemble 2.0 includes the following product enhancements and new functionality:

• Overture Connector is the evolution of Overture's award-winning Ensemble Carrier Ethernet VNF. Overture Connector has already been proven to be the industry's highest performance virtualization platform. This light weight platform provides virtual switching, flow steering across diverse physical and virtual network systems and Carrier Ethernet 2.0 functionality, all in a hardware-agnostic, software-only instance.
• Overture Orchestrator is the next generation of the award-winning Ensemble Service Orchestrator. Overture Orchestrator is an ETSI MANO-compliant NFV orchestration solution that provides end-to-end VNF and network service lifecycle management. Overture Orchestrator handles VNF onboarding, network service design, service deployment as well as service operations and management.
• Overture Controller is a new component of the Ensemble solution that provides Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller capabilities responsible for establishing and managing overlay networking configurations. The Overture Controller leverages the Open Daylight framework for the establishment and management of multi-cloud VNF service chains.
• Overture Analytics expands upon the award-winning big data network and service data correlation of Ensemble Service Intelligence. This innovative correlation approach creates actionable intelligence for policy-driven service orchestration and assurance across existing and new network systems.
• Overture Registrar is a new centralized management framework for zero-touch configuration, hardware and application registration, authentication, access control, licensing management, and VNF inventory.
• Overture Dashboard is a new centralized graphical user interface that provides a common user experience when interacting with the Ensemble solution. Overture Dashboard provides operations personnel a common set of visualization tools for the configuration and management of Ensemble applications.

"As we move into 2016, we will continue to innovate, enhance and expand our virtualization portfolio based on customer feedback and market needs," added Aquino.