Deutsche Telekom, CenturyLink, Reliance and SK Telecom announced a new alliance at Mobile World Congress. The Next Generation Enterprise Network Alliance, to be called Ngena, plans to launch international network services for business customers in the first half of next year. At full global deployment, the partners expected have more than 20 additional service providers in the alliance. The foundation of Ngena is still subject to applicable merger control clearance.
Business customers will benefit from the alliance, gaining international coverage and access to a global catalogue of network services from all the partners. Through network function virtualisation and full end-to-end automation, ngena services are expected to be hugely efficient, the founders said. The alliance also will enable fast provisioning, even in remote places.
With Ngena, the alliance partners aim for profitable growth in global network access and transport services, a USD 50 billion market growing by 3.5 percent annually. Ngena will be enabled by Cisco cloud and virtualisation technology, bringing together the network assets of all the alliance partners in a global next-generation network. Ngena will target multinational companies which seek to purchase their global telecommunications services securely and reliably from a single source. The alliance partners will define unified service levels for the entire global grid, so instead of separate agreements in different countries customers can be served by a single point of contact within the alliance.
Customers will benefit from a variety of additional services provided from the cloud. The alliance partners will be able to deliver full international VPN functionality, Application Performance Management (APM), WAN/LAN management and optimization up to additional built-in services such as unified communication and collaboration, advanced security services and platform APIs for industry-specific use cases (e.g. WLAN analytics for retail).
