After a year of close collaboration, AT&T has announced that it is deploying Israeli networking software company Drivenets to provide its software-based core routing solution, which it says is the largest backbone in the US. No financial details were provided but the deal is almost certainly highly substantial for Drivenets. AT&T has been deploying Drivenets routing solution for some time and US nationwide deployment should be completed within a year.
Drivenets, which was founded in 2015 by CEO Ido Susan and Hillel Kobrinsky, the former head of AT&T's development center in Israel, has developed a cloud solution for telecom companies, which will replace existing networks and meet the demands of 5G, broadband and entertainment content services, as well as AI and Edge applications. Instead of relying on sophisticated routers, Drivenets allows telecom operators to use simpler, smaller and cheaper equipment with the sophistication moving to the software.
Drivenets was chosen as Israel's most promising startup in December 2019. Initially bootstrapped by its founders, the company raised $110 million in February 2019 - a highly exceptional amount for a company's first financing round.
Susan said, "We're thrilled about this opportunity to work with AT&T on their next gen core network, and proud of our engineers for meeting AT&T's rigorous certification process that field-prove the quality of our solution. This announcement demonstrates to those who questioned the disaggregated network model that our Network Cloud is more scalable and cost-efficient than traditional hardware-centric routers. DriveNets is transforming the network in the same way that VMware transformed the compute and storage industry."
"I'm proud to announce today that we have now deployed a next gen IP/MPLS core routing platform into our production network based on the open hardware designs we submitted to OCP last fall," said Andre Fuetsch, AT&T's CTO of Network Services, in his keynote speech at the Open Networking and Edge Summit (ONES). "We chose DriveNets, a disruptive supplier, to provide the Network Operating System (NOS) software for this core use case."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 29, 2020
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