Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei have reinforced their commitment on the Operation Support System Interoperability Initiative (OSSii) by extending scope of the initiative to cover IMS and NFV.
In a statement, Ericsson said it has signed an extended MoU with Huawei and Nokia, which adds management and orchestration (MANO) interfaces and IMS domains to the OSSii agreement the trio signed in 2013.
Martin Sillen, head of network analytics, product line network management, business unit cloud & IP, Ericsson, said the move demonstrates the strength of the company's support for multi-vendor interoperability and its commitment to help telecoms operators optimize their network operations.
Nokia meanwhile has also renewed its OSSii MoU with Ericsson and Huawei to extend the duration and scope of the initiative to cover IMS and virtualized network functions.
Nokia said the extended partnership is aimed to make the integration of mobile network management systems easier.
"We have expanded our collaboration with the OSSii to new areas so our customers, who run multi-vendor networks, are able to easily introduce IMS services and virtualized functions in multi-vendor OSS environments," Bhaskar Gorti, Nokia’s president for applications and analytics, noted.
Initiated by Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia in May 2013, the OSSii promotes interoperability between different OSS vendors' equipment. It aims to enable operators to simplify network operations, reduce overall integration costs and accelerate time-to-market for new services.
MANO is an ETSI-defined framework for the management and orchestration of resources in a cloud data center. IMS is a core network solution that delivers rich real-time communication services, such as HD voice and Wi-Fi calling, for consumer and business users over any access network and for any device type.