XON Opens New Experience Center to Promote SDN and NFV Using Juniper Cloud Platform

XON has opened a new facility dedicated to SDN and NFV technologies and featuring equipment and support from Juniper Networks. The new ‘SDN/NFV Experience Centre’ is based in Johannesburg, South Africa and gives customers hands-on insight about the benefits of using SDN and NFV technologies.

The facility also offers access to the Juniper Networks Contrail Cloud Platform, which is a software-based cloud networking and orchestration platform designed to provide networking as a service. Remote customers can benefit from the center via video conferencing equipment.

XON is a long-time Juniper partner, specializing in building, operating and managing ICT solutions. The South African company is using the Contrail Cloud Platform to provide virtualization, automation and cloud management. XON promotes the use of SDN and NFV as a way to help customers cut costs and bring new services to market quickly and more efficiently.

"The big advantage of SDN and NFV is the opportunity it gives to telecommunications and networking service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively provision services for their enterprise customers," said Anthony Laing, GM of Networking at XON. "The combined SDN and NFV concept is probably the biggest trend to impact service providers since the introduction of IP, particularly at a time when bandwidth is commoditized and value-added services are the only way to drive future growth through differentiation and meeting service delivery expectations."

"Service providers are constantly faced with roadblocks that slow their ability to deliver new services to customers,” added Paul Obsitnik, VP, service provider marketing at Juniper Networks. “The Experience Centre provides an opportunity to see how innovative services can be structured, perform, be taken to market and used to increase revenues. We can assist service providers with justifying the business case, implementing the service and taking it to market and help them to accelerate the overall process."