Nuage Networks, an Alcatel-Lucent venture focused on software defined networking (SDN) solutions, announced an open software-based solution to address data center network constraints that limit cloud services adoption.

The Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) is aimed at healthcare, banking, utilities large Internet companies and telecom service providers. It was designed to help clients to scale their cloud infrastructure and provide instant, secure connectivity to multiple customers.

VSP automates the entire data center network, creating secure “slices” for each customer, shortening provisioning time. It scales to support very large data centers with thousands of customers, each with thousands of users, Alcatel-Lucent said.

This is what makes it suitable for public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud services delivered by large end users.

Michel Combes, Alcatel-Lucent's new CEO who started in his new role today, said it was exciting to start his first day with an announcement that would expand the size of the market the company can go after. “Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN strategy and the Nuage Networks branded portfolio announced today builds on the cloud orchestration we already provide with our CloudBand Management System,” he said.

“We are very well positioned to help telecom and cloud service providers build large scale cloud infrastructure and services, opening up new revenue opportunities for our customers and ourselves.”

Trials of the platform begin in April in Europe and North America. Trial customers include UK cloud service provider Exponential-e, French telecoms service provider SFR, Canadian telecoms service provider Telus and US healthcare provider University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

Worldwide commercial availability is planned for mid-2013.