Huawei introduced a cloud VPN service it said enables operators to tackle enterprise leased line challenges such as slow provisioning, lack of service and difficult operation, allowing them to boost enterprise revenue by delivering a variety of value-added services.

Bruce Xun, VP of Huawei’s Global Technical Service Department, said CloudVPN Integration Service is designed to help operators overcome time-to-market and agility challenges in the enterprise space and build market share in sectors, such as hosting and security, where they have traditionally been weak.

According to a survey by Analysys Mason, while most enterprises turn to operators for data networking and mobility services, just 27 per cent expect to use telcos for security services by 2020. And less than half will host their data with their telecoms operator in four years.

Enterprise revenue currently accounts for a small share operators’ overall revenue, Xun said, but many have set very high targets for the future as they work to improve their market share in value-added services, which can range from security to load-balancing to WAN acceleration.

The rapidly expand B2B sector is a multi-billion dollar market that represents both an opportunity and challenge for carriers, which are facing erosion in traditional service areas such as voice and SMS.

As enterprises tap into big data, Huawei sees a trend towards moving ICT services to the cloud.

“Cloud VPN has got more attention in recent years as operators move forwards on their ICT transformation plans,” Xun said. “Our CloudVPN Integration Service provides more efficient, more flexible and richer services.”

A third-party survey of more than 50 operators around the world found that 45 per cent plan to provide cloud VPN services before the end of 2017, and 74 per cent expect more than a 10 per cent increase in ARPU from value-added services.

Nearly 70 per cent currently use an integration partner. Their top three concerns were multi-vendor integration, orchestration and APIs, and network design.

One-stop provider
CloudVPN Integration Service helps operators open up their IT infrastructure through the cloud. By combining cloud and leased-line services, and integrating value-added services from its partners. Xun said operators can be a one-stop provider of cloud ICT services to enterprise customers.

Multi-vendor ICT resource orchestration allows enterprises to use cloud and network resources on demand and in real time, shortening the services provisioning time to minutes. ICT orchestration also facilitates the development of APIs, which can be embedded in the applications of every industry to enhance the ecosystem of operators.

The CloudVPN Integration Service provides accurate network planning, which Xun said helps carriers reduce time to market for new services over the overlay network architecture. “The solution can accurately identify the network bandwidth bottlenecks based on enterprise service prospects and optimise networks accordingly to ensure services quality.”

Huawei also announced it completed integration and verification with 20 ecosystem partners via its Cloud Open Labs, with the aim to expand that number to 30 by the end of the year. These include Check Point, Citrix, Fortinet, Red Hat and Riverbed.

Its Cloud Open Labs gives operators access to a range of third-party value-added services that have been pre-integrated by its partners. He said operators can add these new services in just seven days.

One of its value-added partners, Fortinet, a US-based enterprise security firm, is offering a carrier-grade firewall and gateway products that have been integrated for CloudVPN Integration Service.

Chin Beng Yue, VP for global technical services at Fortinet, said: “We are working with Huawei to achieve cloud agility and elasticity to make security less complex. When you grow, your security must grow with you end-to-end.”

Huawei is working on richer integration tools to improve the quality and efficiency of the integration, with plans to expand its test team to more than 60 senior engineers.

The company plans to interconnect Cloud Open Labs with leading test labs worldwide to create more mature testing for multi-vendor vertical integration.

Time to market
Xun said the time to provision a leased line can be reduced from a month to just 15 minutes with its CloudVPN Integration Service.

He gave the example of the difficulties Huawei experienced in requesting a VPN for the Operations Transformation Forum event in Wuzhen from a service provider. It contacted the operator two months ago, then did some final configuration over the past two weeks and was charged for a full month, for just a few days connectivity.

In another example, the company needed to pay for one month for two hours of VPN services at a venue in China, showing how inflexible service providers’ provisioning can be.

“This is not an exception, it happens all the time all over the world. The provisioning for enterprise customers can be reduced from months to a few minutes with our CloudVPN Integration Service,” Xun said.