GlobalData, a renowned international information services firm, has recently released a report titled WAN SDN Controller: Competitive Landscape Assessment. According to the report, Huawei's iMaster NCE has emerged as the top performer among leading suppliers and has been recognized as the world leader of WAN SDN controllers.
Figure 1: GlobalData WAN SDN controller: competitive landscape assessment
In the report, GlobalData assessed the top eight suppliers worldwide across six dimensions: Product Scope, Open Environment, Network Performance, Major System Components, Solution Breadth, and Deployment Readiness. The evaluation was based on five rating levels: Leader, Very Strong, Strong, Competitive, and Vulnerable. Among these suppliers, Huawei's iMaster NCE received the highest rating of Leader in four dimensions: Deployment Readiness, Network Performance, Product Scope, and Solution Breadth. It also achieved the only Leader rating overall. According to the report, Huawei’s iMaster NCE stands out from its competitors by prioritizing the utilization of automation, analysis, and intelligent algorithms. These features enable carriers to achieve a high level of autonomy in network operation.
Figure 2: Huawei's iMaster NCE product scores
In the report, GlobalData pointed out that combining WAN SDN controllers and automation has become integral to end-to-end software infrastructure. Future solutions are expected to prioritize evolution directions and automation capabilities, meeting the needs of carriers for increased efficiency and reduced costs through intelligent technologies and automation support. As the industry continues to develop, Huawei NCE optical network domain has been oriented to key roles in service operation and formed core value frameworks such as T-AUTO, A-PRIME, and E-5S, correspondingly promoting the quality evolution of optical transport, optical access, and optical government and enterprise services.
- In the optical transport domain, each one of the capabilities of T-AUTO focuses on differentiated and deterministic SLAs, which are key to quality evolution. Based on the Transport digital map, key capabilities, such as Agile service routing, Ultimate SLA guarantee, and Time-saving ticket journey can be provided to enhance network automation. Empowered by Open to NaaS, T-AUTO further enables the WDM infrastructure network to better meet flexible and diversified service requirements in the new era.
- In the optical access domain, A-PRIME, as an acronym representing a group of valuable capabilities, is dedicated to enhancing the premium home broadband experience by improving the quality of each device, network, service, user, and application through the Access experience digitalized foundation. Based on that, five valuable capabilities, namely, Precise marketing insight, Reliable deployment quality, Instant troubleshooting, Measurable customer experience, and Easy self-service, can be provided to marketing departments, installation and maintenance engineers, call center/network operation centers, network O&M/planning departments, and end-users. A-PRIME is an endeavor to deliver premium experience of each service touch points to all users throughout the service.
- In the optical network domain for enterprises and governments, E-5S, the combination of brand-new capabilities for campuses, aims to build a converged, agile, and intelligent enterprise ICT infrastructure management system. With Easy integration capability empowered by NBIs, Simplified planning,Speedy deployment, Smart maintenance, Superb experience, and Supreme reliability, E-5S compatibly enables digital operation and enhances intelligent campus quality.
Empowered by the three value frameworks, carriers and enterprises in and outside China have taken the lead in service quality evolution. For example, A-PRIME has been commercially deployed at more than 50 projects in China, significantly improving carriers' monetization capabilities as well as user experience. In Henan Province, with improved and precise user insights, carriers have seen more than a three-fold increase in the marketing success rate of FTTR, gigabit, and other services. In Zhejiang Province, with poor-QoE root cause analysis and proactive poor-QoE optimization, carriers managed to reduce the poor-QoE rate on the entire network from 4.3% to 2.7% and the complaints per 10,000 users from 165 to 95.
Furthermore, T-AUTO has been verified at over 110 commercial and innovative sites around the world, significantly improving the O&M efficiency of carriers' optical networks. In Spain's pilot project, automatic OTN network fault identification and locating cover all the manual ticket dispatching scenarios and realize automatic ticket dispatching. The fault locating time is reduced from 8 hours to 5 minutes, boosting troubleshooting efficiency. In China, more than 40,000 services have been provisioned on the T-AUTO-based optical transport network, bringing more than CNY 2.5 billion in revenue.
Furthermore, digital capabilities enabled by E-5S has benefited thousands of industries. It mainly addresses time-consuming network deployment, slow network maintenance and fault locating, and difficulty in assuring network experience, and reshapes the digital O&M experience by achieving seamless provisioning, and smooth O&M and delivering a premium experience. In the coal mine industry, visualized network-wide O&M reduces underground maintenance time by 90%, effectively ensuring the security of mine O&M and production. In the data center, service expansion can be commissioned in minutes with only one site visit required. In addition, the fiber deterioration fault prediction rate reaches 95%.
Yue Wei, President of Huawei NCE Optical Network Domain, said that the world's Leader rating is a recognition of Huawei's leading technologies and product values. As service requirements iterate, the supply side needs to innovate to keep pace with the demand side. Looking forward, Huawei will continue to bring premium experience to every home and industry by implementing high-quality autonomous operations in optical networks.
