GigaSpaces Technologies, the company behind the Cloudify pure-play open NFV orchestration platform, and Metaswitch Networks, the leading network software provider, announced today that they will bring Metaswitch’s production- and cloud-ready open source virtual network functions (VNFs) to telecom carrier market segments.

Carriers attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week can learn how the two companies are working to accelerate the migration from proprietary, monolithic networks to an NFV environment. Cloudify and Metaswitch teams will co-present this proven, simple and fully open source solution at the VMware booth in Hall 3 3K10. The solution runs on top of VMware’s VIO (VMware Integrated OpenStack) and vCloud Director (VCD).

“GigaSpaces and Metaswitch are both committed to and backers of leading open source projects,” said Paul Brittain, vice president of wireless and multimedia products at Metaswitch. “Our work together supports open source solutions for the telecom domain, which up until recently has been dominated by expensive and proprietary platforms from incumbent vendors.”

The integration between the two companies’ technologies provides carriers with an alternative means to deliver an IMS and other NFV services based on Metaswitch Clearwater Core IMS and managed through Cloudify—an open source, TOSCA-based orchestration framework that follows the principles of the ETSI MANO specification and provides true multi-VIM support including OpenStack, VMware VIO and VCD infrastructure.

“Large network providers looking to automate the deployment and configuration of their VNFs and add support for ETSI and TOSCA can use this integration as a reference for how to incorporate Cloudify as an embeddable management and automation framework,” said Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces.

A Clearwater Core IMS onboarding demo is available at the Cloudify website, with the sources in Github. This working demo is available for VMware users on VCD and VIO, as well as OpenStack users, allowing network providers to configure, launch, manage, monitor and auto-scale and heal their services across VMware and OpenStack environments freely.

The ability to take complex network services and automate deployment and management out of the box through a simple download, as demonstrated by Orange Labs at the latest OPNFV event, completely revolutionizes the way network services can be delivered. It reduces costs, and it democratizes the core carrier backbone by leveraging open source software.