Brothers in Arms: Telco Systems Strikes a Deal for uCPE with Arm

Telco Systems has struck a multiyear agreement with Arm for the development of service-ready universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) boxes and edge devices based on Arm’s architecture.

Raanan Tzemach, vice president for product management at Telco Systems, said the agreement includes the development of products for network functions virtualization (NFV), mobile edge computing (MEC) and internet of things (IoT) while also expanding the ecosystem for Telco System’s NFVTime uCPE solution running on Arm’s architecture.

In an email to FierceTelecom, Tzemach said the deal size was in the range of a low seven-figure amount. The two companies previously announced that Telco System’s NFVTime, which is an NFV infrastructure (NFVi) operating system for white-box appliances, ran on Arm’s architecture.

Working with Arm’s technical team, Telco Systems will lead a multiyear development program that will include making prototypes for uCPE boxes into products, specifically those based on NXP and Marvell system-on-chips (SoCs), as well as NFV edge solutions.

As part of the partnership, Telco Systems is focusing on the development of solutions that utilize Arm and its vendors’ SoC solutions for the containerization of virtual network functions (VNF) and cybersecurity solutions based on Arm’s technology. The companies said the new products would also serve as the foundation for future Arm-based edge compute, IoT and MEC solutions.

“We are experiencing great interest for the Arm technology in North America and strong demand in Western Europe,” Tzemach said. “At the same time, our ecosystem is expanding rapidly and gaining strong momentum. We are currently involved in a number of PoCs trials in these markets.”

The two companies will also work on developing an ecosystem with VNF vendors and SoC companies. The ecosystem will also allow VNF and white-box vendors  to develop and certify their products on NFVTime.

The NFVTime-Arm ecosystem includes a broad portfolio of VNFs from leading vendors, Tzemach said. “Some of these ecosystem partners include Marvell, NXP, 6Wind, Trend Micro and a number of SD-WAN and firewall vendors. Our ecosystem also supports many OEMs, including NexCom and CyberTan. Three additional white box vendors are in the process of joining our ecosystem, which we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks.”

Late last year, Telco Systems partnered with 6Wind to develop a virtual router that uses both Arm and Intel’s architectures.

“This existing product already supports a virtual router and security use cases over a Marvell and NXP chipset,” Tzemach said. “The next products from this co-development should be available in the coming two to three months. These will be mostly new use cases and applications for our NFVTime uCPE running on Arm architecture.” – Fierce Telecom