Federos
Revolutionizing the World of NFV/SDN

Moving into the 21st century, the network monitoring and management sector has evolved tremendously to deal with a broader variety of market challenges and increased complexity of IT operations. Along with decades of innovation in service management, comes consequently a rise in the demand for an upgrade of age-old legacy infrastructures within enterprises. As today’s enterprise landscape has grown out of inventory backed, siloed solutions addressing specific issues like fault and performance management, service providers look to deploy an all-in-one cohesive solution for service assurance engagements. In a dynamic step to address these opportunities, Federos and its proprietary products, Assure1 and Fusion1, began a journey to help customers cut complexities associated with end-to-end service management. Federos helps service providers and carriers simplify, automate, and modernize their network operations centers through a singular experience. Drew Golden, senior product manager of Federos says, “Our products easily integrate into customers’ legacy infrastructures, enabling them to consolidate bespoke software tools onto one platform.”

As experienced operations management professionals, Federos founders noticed that all the existing service management tools stood irrelevant against network function virtualization (NFV) challenges given that it has a great deal of dependency on real-time automation. This propelled them to develop Assure1 - converging all the core functionalities of system management into one single package that includes fault management, performance management and additional layers of topology that can be integrated with legacy infrastructure and management.

According to Golden, Federos customers seek end-to-end insight of their complicated service operations topology, with ability to visualize and manage dependent and dynamic relationships in real-time. They often must share connections, and lease backhaul and transport layers from other carriers. Assure1 consolidates all service information into a single place, taking in the different layers of topology and helping carriers build upon several layers of automation leading to legacy inventory reconciliation. Setting up the topology for NFV/SDN constitutes a tedious task that requires management teams to change the ingestion of service chain information for integrating with the provisioning process.

Assure1 allows this change and links into different provision orchestrations systems offering a dynamic service connecting physical hardware to the virtual environment. Golden states, “There is a lot of bespoke automation that our customers leverage today, because we are connecting the whole system to the virtualized world.”

There is a lot of bespoke automation that our customers leverage today, because of which, we are connecting the whole system to the virtualized world

Assure1 service management also enables operations to respond in realtime to incidents that impact the ability to meet service level agreements (SLAs). The service eliminates the need to manually analyze and correlate data from diverse tools residing in both discrete and hybrid networks. In addition, the integrated event analytics module of Assure1 provides sophisticated machine learning to help customers quickly and accurately pinpoint, analyze and resolve the root cause of service-impacting events. “We treat every event as the first-class citizen. Every time an event is changed it represents significant information in Assure1 database,” adds Golden.

With a steady growth rate and a unique approach of automating the workflows to enhance efficiencies, Federos has a keen cognizance of the growing demand for flexible and microservice-based solutions among carriers. In response, the company’s next major release will focus on being able to containerize things that need to linearly scale out based on their use. “We are planning for the platform to scale out dynamically as one that has to be 100 percent cloud,” concludes Golden.