The idea, said Rahul Sachdev, VP of marketing at Menlo Park, California-based Intelliden, is to marry the two co-existing domains of policy and OSS, so as to extend the intelligence we have in the last mile back into the core of next-generation networks.

The rationale for the move, said Scott Stevens, VP of systems engineering for the Americas at Sunnyvale, California-based Juniper, is that certain sorts of applications such as video, voice and gaming are very bandwidth-hungry and demand perfect rather than best-efforts services, with no packet loss whatsoever. As such, they demand guaranteed bandwidth across a network and, since operators want to underpin them with SLAs, there is a need to be able to provide such service on a real-time basis.

What all these apps have in common, of course, is that they run on the UDP rather than TCP protocol, which means they can’t be optimized and accelerated, unlike apps such as CIFS, MAPI, HTTP and FTP, where Juniper acquired the vendors Peribit (WAN optimization) and Redline (app acceleration) for the purpose. Thus bandwidth management is the only way to address UDP apps, and by tying it back in with policy at the core, the two vendors believe they are moving towards automating actions on carriers’ NGNs and reducing response times.

The two products involved in the combined Dynamic Networking Automation (DNA) solution are the Service Deployment System (SDX) from Juniper and Dynamic Resources Provisioning from Intelliden.

The idea is that the apps can talk to SDX to inform it of their bandwidth requirements, with the policy manager in turn talk to the Intelliden platform to provision and build the necessary label switch paths (LSPs) and guarantee the bandwidth on them, with Intelliden then updating SDX as to what’s up and running and where. Equally, if a given service can support, say, 10,000 users at a given bandwidth, the 10,001st can be sent a message to say the network is busy at that time when he or she tries to log in, or even better, when the network hits 9,500 we can send a message out to the Intelliden product to resize the pipe, Stevens argued.

The two companies admit that they first thought of the DNA offering in response to a request from a common customer, namely Canadian operator Telus, whose director of OSS architecture and strategy, Brian Lakey, said the request was conditioned by the provision that it be a commercially available rather than a bespoke implementation.

To this end, said Sachdev, the companies are working on the productization of DNA, with something generally available in the second half of this year. He added that they are still working on the pricing model.

In terms of their competitors, the two sides of the DNA offering face different players. Steves said SDX generally meets the likes of Operax, Camiant and Tazz in the area of policy management, with Operax OEMed by Ericsson while Tazz has a relationship with Cisco. Sachdev said Intelliden meets different competitors in config management, resource provisioning and compliance, its three areas of activity, but nobody does all three, and no-one has real-time state awareness in heterogeneous networks.

Though most of the talk around the DNA offer will be about consumer services such as IPTV and video-on-demand, Sachdev said it will be equally relevant for enterprise WANs. For instance if an enterprise is running a multi-site videoconference and one link fails, it can trigger an automatic failover to an alternative route, he cited.