GEANT seeks to establish one or more framework agreement(s) that will support the sourcing of products and services required for it to investigate programmable and virtualisation technologies.

This is to enable it to deal with exponential bandwidth increases and highly unpredictable traffic in a more economical way.

The intent is to:

— mitigate the need to over provision at multiple network layers, delivering application awareness in the network for application-based path selection;

— integration with other Infrastructures;

— add programmability to offer the ability to use APIs to link applications to the network.

It will also remove our dependence on vendor software and provide the ability to outsource / crowdsource service development, enabling greater agility as well as increasing the speed of service development.