Telstra has expanded the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) platform it gained from its acquisition of Pacnet, making it available to customers globally across 25 points of presence in eight countries. Aside from being available in Singapore and Hong Kong, the points of presence are also found in Australia, the United States and United Kingdom.

PEN is an innovative platform that leverages OpenStack to allow customers to cut the provisioning of network services from the traditional days and weeks to just minutes. As we reported earlier, customers can dial networking services and bandwidth up and down on the fly, and pay for what they use via an on-demand model.

Smart networks

“Pacnet’s leadership in early adoption of SDN technology has allowed us to accelerate our plans and building on Pacnet’s existing sixteen PEN Points of Presence across Asia, we’ve added nine new Telstra PEN Points of Presence to create the world’s first globally connected on-demand networking Platform,” said Darrin Webb, chief operating officer for Global Enterprise and Services at Telstra.

The announcement came just a few months after the acquisition of the Singapore and Hong Kong-based operator by Telstra. To gain a better perspective of the swift integration, we contacted Jim Clarke, head of marketing, products and pricing at Telstra, who explained that both Telstra and Pacnet follow the agile method of architecting and delivering new solutions.

According to Clarke, this ensured that the integration approach was kept aligned at all times. “One of the biggest considerations for any network integration is maintaining an optimized and stable customer experience,” Clarke told DatacenterDynamics. “So our focus was firmly set on ensuring all processes and systems were rigorously tested and there was no impact on customers.”

The acquisition of Pacnet by Telstra at the tail end of 2014 was a significant development that expanded the reach of Telstra in the Asia Pacific in terms of data centers and network connectivity. You can read more about this in “Why Telstra is paying $700m for Pacnet” here.