VMware Adds Vendor Partners, NFV Services

**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services.**

VMware on Wednesday said it’s adding three new certified VMware Ready NFV (network functions virtualization) services and four new members to its Ready NFV program.

The virtualization giant now has nine certified services from eight different vendors for VMware vCloud NFV, including newly certified partners F5, Silver Peak and VeloCloud. Also, Infoblox, Netrounds and two larger global network equipment providers (NEPs) have joined Mitel as partners with services currently going through certification.

The new certified services include: F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition; Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN; and VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN.{ad}

VMware Ready NFV allows partners to certify their virtual network functions for compatibility with VMware NFV infrastructure (NFVi). The VMware Ready certification provides CSPs with the “confidence that partner NFV solutions will seamlessly and efficiently deploy, run, and interoperate with vCloud NFV,” the company said.

The VMware Ready program designates VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products and services created by its established partners, and accreditation “builds customer confidence and accelerates further opportunities for collaboration as leaders in the cloud,” the company said.

“VMware continues to make excellent progress in advancing our innovative vCloud NFV platform, and the VMware Ready NFV program is critical to helping customers adopt and deploy NFV with confidence,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of products and solutions for VMware’s Telco NFV Group. “Together, VMware and its partners are helping customers transform their businesses with network functions virtualization that helps them lower costs considerably and enables rapid and agile service innovation.”

Nav Chander, IDC research manager for enterprise telecom, said NFV is “beginning to have a significant impact for a number of leading CSPs as they transform their networks, operations, engineering and services organization and embrace virtualization, DevOps, and open-source software.”

“This journey toward this transformation of network infrastructure and services, to an NFV-enabled network architecture, will be a bumpy road over the next several years,” he said. “The quick ramp of VMware in certifying partner solutions on the vCloud NFV platform demonstrates a strong commitment from the company to helping CSP customers in addressing the challenges of NFV adoption.”