Cisco Ultra Packet Core, the Transition Begins

So yesterday we had our first snowfall up here in New England, holidays are coming fast, and so are events like the Consumer Electronics Show and Mobile World Congress.

Well while it was snowing yesterday, I realized that I had not updated our industry veterans on our Packet Core Transition. So there has been a lot of industry discussions recently in various industry press and blogs on Virtualized Packet Core (VPC) and Packet Core, but when I did a quick read and found that Cisco Ultra Packet Core information was missing and so I thought that I would take some time and give you an update on our customer transition to our Ultra Services Platform (USP) and in particular the transition to the software based Ultra Packet Core (UPC). Some industry veteran reporters know that our customers have begun the transition to a software based Mobile Packet Core (MPC) for some time, and we too have seen this transition begin in earnest. It is no longer just let’s try to put the VPC in parts of the network like for M2M/IoT, we are seeing customers like AT&T ( Connected Car, Consumer/EPC ), XL Axiata in Indonesia put their entire 60 Million plus customer base onto our UPC, and many more are transitioning. We are seeing not only mobile operators deploy our UPC we are seeing government agencies, military, enterprise, and mining companies deploy our UPC.

So the transition from the traditional Packet Core, our ASR 5000 Series has begun

Figure 1

Figure 1 Cisco UPC Wins as of December 2016

You can see by the image in figure 1 we have about 70 UPC customer wins as of December 1st and still have a healthy pipeline of Proof Of Concepts (POCs) with 27. For the past few quarters we have seen some of our 350+ ASR 5000 Series customers transition to UPC, but also they are beginning to migrate to our newer cloud based platforms like our new Ultra M Platform.

Also did I tell you that this same Ultra Services Platform recently won the Telecom Asia Readers Choice Award for “Cloud Innovation of the Year for the Cisco Ultra Platform”! Cisco also won the Readers Choice Awards for “SDN Innovation of the Year for the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) and Data Center Innovation of the Year for its ACI and Tetration solutions”

So as I said we just wanted to give a quick update on the great progress that we have made with our customers to transition to our software based Ultra Packet Core, which is part of our Ultra Services Platform.

Stay tuned to this space for more updates.

For more information on Cisco Ultra Packet Core, please click here.

For more information on Ultra M or send an e-mail to info-ultram@cisco.com and visit the Ultra M page.

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