Light Reading's Upskill University Launches Courses on Network Transformation & SDN

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Nov 7, 2016) -  Upskill U, a free online forum that focuses on delivering must-have education on the overall business transformation occurring in the telecommunications industry, is focusing its next round of lectures on the business impact and technological challenges of NFV MANO and SDN.

During these courses, lecturers from AT&T, Orange Business Services, Equinix and more address network functions virtualization (NFV), management and orchestration (MANO) and software defined networking (SDN); interoperability challenges between virtualized and legacy equipment; and tools and strategies to advance virtualization and improve network efficiency and provisioning.

Upskill U is a unique online community -- now with more than 6,000 registered students -- hosted by Light Reading in association with Cisco Systems. Upskill U enables service provider and enterprise decision-makers to crowdsource the mission-critical intelligence they need to formulate business technology strategies, and gain the know-how required to architect and monetize next-generation, all-IP networks.

Upskill U's curriculum is always built around the hottest topics in the industry. This new series on network transformation and SDN includes the following lectures:

• MANO 101 (Wednesday, Nov. 9, 1:00 p.m. ET): Toby Ford, Assistant Vice President, Cloud Technology, Strategy & Planning, AT&T covers the three functional blocks of MANO, strategies for integration with open APIs, best practices for utilizing key technologies in MANO and successful MANO case studies.
• Open Source for NFV MANO (Friday, Nov. 11, 1:00 p.m. ET): James Crawshaw, Senior Analyst, OSS/BSS Transformation, Heavy Reading examines the growing role of open source in NFV MANO, including use cases, and identifies how operators can successfully implement open source in their NFV strategies.
• SDN 101 (Wednesday, Nov. 16, 1:00 p.m. ET): John Isch, Director, Network & Voice Practice, North America, Orange Business Services, addresses core concepts of SDN, networks-as-a-service and network functions enabled by SDN, and explains how telcos can balance the need for increasing network agility with the bottom line.
• SDN & Open Source (Friday, Nov. 18, 1:00 p.m. ET): Chris Rice, Senior Vice President, Domain 2.0 Architecture & Design, AT&T Labs, examines open source opportunities for advancing SDN strategies, challenges to implementing open source, key open source projects for SDN and how telcos are balancing open and proprietary solutions for SDN.
• SDN & the Software Defined Data Center (Wednesday, Nov. 30, 1:00 p.m. ET): Paul Mason, Global Solutions Architect, Equinix, explains how service providers can boost automation, improve security and lower opex with SDDCs, and addresses the challenges of software-defined data centers for service providers.
• The SDN Approach to IP & Optical Integration (Friday, Dec. 2, 1:00 p.m. ET): Sterling Perrin, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading, covers past challenges to IP and optical integration, how SDN enables this integration and benefits like increased network efficiency and better bandwidth provisioning.

Each Upskill U course is a 45-minute session where students can ask questions, interact with other students with similar business and technological challenges and expertise and download a wealth of additional learning materials. Courses are archived, and online educational discussions take place 24 hours a day.

Weekly Upskill U courses will continue to highlight some of the biggest names in the industry. Register for our current courses and upskill yourself today.

For the complete Upskill U schedule, visit our website at www.lightreading.com/upskillu.

About Light Reading

Light Reading (www.lightreading.com) combines its research-led online communities and targeted events portfolio to help those in the global communications industry make informed decisions. Lightreading.com is the ultimate source for telecom analysis for more than 400,000 subscribers each month, leading the media sector in terms of traffic, content and reputation. Light Reading produces targeted communications events and focused one-day conferences each year for cable, mobile and wireline executives across five continents.