Centina Systems, leading innovator in strategic assurance and network performance management solutions, announced they are a key participant in the latest TM Forum catalyst project entitled “Do drones dream of electric sheep?”.
The project, championed by Vodafone, explores the future of drone services for commercial application.
The catalyst–or proof of concept - will focus on the application of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones as a service for the agricultural and telecommunications industries. Drones are used today, sporadically, to take field photographs or identify maintenance issues without sending humans to investigate. This proof of concept fully explores how communications service providers can roll out drones as a service application.
Since almost half of all drone sales this year are for agricultural use to assist farmers with monitoring their fields and livestock, Vodafone seeks to take this a step further to automate drone flights as a platform-based service. In support of these efforts, Centina Systems will develop plug-ins to assure drones, providing the ability to monitor drone health as well as the 5G elements of the services.
Centina Systems previously teamed with Vodafone on a related catalyst project entitled “Delivering Open Cloud Ecosystems for Digital SME” focused on delivering Open Cloud Ecosystems for Digital SMEs with Zero Touch Orchestration, Operation and Management (ZOOM).
Anand Gonuguntla, Co-Founder and CEO of Centina Systems
We are excited to be continuing our innovative work with Vodafone on this TM Forum Catalyst and are proud to lend our expertise and dynamic solutions to assure the future delivery of drones as a service. Working towards the demonstration of this project planned for TM Forum Live! 2017, the next step in this joint effort will not only emphasize the critical importance of assurance across virtualized networks but also enable us to validate tangible 5G use cases.
