Mavenir Systems announced Monday that it has acquired assets associated with the Virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) product family from Brocade Communications Systems. This acquisition extends Mavenir’s position in network transformation and enhances its next-generation core network with a feature-rich, virtualized evolved packet core, expanded customer base, and advanced network slicing capabilities important to 5G architectures.
The transaction includes all associated Intellectual Property (IP) including 22 granted and pending patents, a research and development facility in Mumbai, India and associated customer support and maintenance contracts.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Combined with Mavenir’s existing Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) offerings, the vEPC is a key part of a mobile edge computing and IoT strategy. Supporting low-latency use cases at the network edge enables service providers and enterprises to connect mobile and IoT devices, data centers, and public or private clouds.
The explosive growth of mobile data combined with emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT connectivity means that mobile operators need native virtualization solutions now after having seen that the node based ported virtualization fails to create flexible, scalable, and easy-to-deploy packet cores. Brocade’s highly-differentiated vEPC solution has unique architectural attributes that leverage cloud computing, network virtualization, and software networking technologies to deliver higher scale and efficiency on industry-standard x86-based servers.
The software can scale from a single microprocessing core to a rack of servers depending on the use case as it maps dimensions of mobile workload independently to cloud resources, while maintaining the capability to integrate with traditional node-based EPC architectures.
“We are building a 5G architecture with control plane-user plane separation and stateless VNFs. The small footprint, combined with a highly scalable architecture and built-in HSS, is ideal for Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), private LTE and industrial IoT spaces,” said Ashok Khuntia, GM and EVP of Mavenir’s Access Products division. “When bundled with our virtualized radio access network product, Mavenir offers a complete, fully virtualized end-to-end next generation core and access network.”
“As the industry transitions towards LTE and 5G, there is a critical and growing requirement for a new, more distributed network architecture and that includes a flexible, microservices-based EPC that allows for the independent scaling of control, data and users in response to different workloads. It provides inherent capability for network slicing,” said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO of Mavenir. “We aim to be a key provider of next-generation network services, with a path to 5G and edge computing for our customers.”
Kohli added, “With this acquisition, Mavenir continues to deliver the innovation and differentiated services that customers expect from us.”
In connection with the transaction, Mavenir is hiring certain Brocade employees associated with the vEPC business. This team will be working closely together with Mavenir to support customers of Brocade vEPC as well as deliver differentiable end-to-end solutions in future to ensure continued support for customers.
