It’s nice to have a sounding-board news trigger to launch a discussion from, and Oracle has obligingly provided me that with its Evolved Communications Application Server. This is a product that I believe is driven by the same industry trends that Alcatel-Lucent’s Rapport is, and potentially could deliver services that could compete with Google’s Fi. The new services could be valuable. A competitive response to Google could be valuable. But is this path going to create value enough for the future? That’s the question, and particularly relevant given the Ciena/Cyan deal announced today.
Operators face a double challenge in preparing for networking’s new age. The first challenge is to find new services, and beat OTTs to leading with them. The second challenge is validating hundreds of billion dollars in sunk costs. It’s easy to be an OTT. It’s relatively easy to be an operator who offers OTT services. It’s hard for operators to build next-gen services in a way that builds on their current investment, their current incumbencies.
Mobile and IMS are poster-children for this. One of the ideas behind IMS was that it could support new applications that would extend basic mobile services. However, mobile services today means “getting on the Internet”, which is hardly an extension of IMS capabilities. Operators have longed for a practical way to make IMS into an OTT competitor. Nothing has worked.
Google’s Fi is a shot across the bow of operators. Coming from the OTT side, using an MVNO relationship as the basis, Google wants to create value-add without the IMS legacy. Their position is that you can use 3GPP standards to control handsets below the service layer. That’s not operator-friendly.
Both Oracle’s new ECAS and Alcatel-Lucent’s Rapport build on IMS, Rapport because it includes it and ECAS because it builds on VoLTE, which depends on IMS. It’s interesting that Oracle talks about ECAS in VoLTE terms rather than in IMS terms; it shows how far IMS has fallen strategically.
Yeah, but IMS is still necessary for 4G services, so the issue of how to extend new services to 4G users remains. I like the idea of building a kind of “service PaaS” that operators could build to (or buy to) to extend their investment in mobile services. The question is whether this will lead the operators to somewhere useful.
Both ECAS and Rapport start with a “universal session” concept that allows calls and session services to be connected across WiFi or cellular and roam between the two (or among them). Google Fi also has that. Both ECAS and Rapport would, in my view, allow operators to build Fi-like competitive services and extend them. All good so far.
The question that remains for both ECAS and Rapport is “what next”. Both Alcatel-Lucent and Oracle point to the compatibility of their approaches with NFV. To me that demonstrates that vendors and therefore the buyers think that NFV compatibility is a bridge to the future. You can deploy elements of Rapport and ECAS with NFV-like orchestration.
The problem is that a “service PaaS” is still a PaaS, meaning that it’s a kind of silo. If there are special features to be included in a service PaaS, even if they are deployed using NFV as VNFs, are these features open parts of an NFV architecture? Would the operators’ investment in the platform be extensible to other services, particularly non-session services?
Maybe they would, but it seems likely that NFV would have to be extended explicitly to optimize the picture. There’s absolutely no reason why NFV couldn’t deploy “platform services” that would become part of a service framework to be used by specialized applications. What would be bad is that this framework created a different service lifecycle management process. Operations has to be unified overall, across everything, or evolution to a new service infrastructure will be difficult.
The question may be critical for NFV because this year is the watershed for the concept in my view. If we can’t promote an NFV vision that can prove ecosystemic benefits in a real field trial by year’s end, then operators may have to find another way to manage their profit-on-infrastructure squeeze.
The Ciena acquisition of Cyan might be a path to that. You may recall that I’ve proposed the network of the future would be built on an agile opto-electrical foundation that would take over the heavy lifting in terms of aggregation and transport efficiency. As this layer builds from optical pipes to path grooming at the electrical level, it could well cross a bunch of different technologies, ranging from fibers or wavelengths to tunnels and Ethernet. Orchestration and operational integration would be very valuable, even essential, in harmonizing this structure.
But like our service PaaS, the vision of agile opto-electrical layers isn’t a slam dunk. I’ve not been a fan of Cyan’s approach, considering it lacking in both scope of orchestration and in integration of management and OSS/BSS. It does have potential for the more limited mission of orchestrating the bottom layer. However, to meet it there will have to be a significant improvement in operations integration.
Ciena had previously announced an NFV, and their opening statement on the proposed Cyan deal is worth reading (from their press release):
Cyan offers SDN, NFV, and metro packet-optical solutions, which have built a strong customer base that is complementary to Ciena. Cyan also provides multi-vendor network and service orchestration and next-generation network management software with advanced visualization. When combined with Ciena’s Agility software portfolio, Cyan’s next-generation software and platforms enable greater monetization for network operators through more efficient utilization of network assets and faster time-to-market with differentiated and profitable services.
This seems a pretty clear statement that the deal is driven in no small way by SDN and NFV, and I do think that the companies could combine to present a strong opto-electric agility story for the metro. Such a story might not offer new services to operators like the Alcatel-Lucent and Oracle visions of a Service PaaS, but it might offer cost management and it has the advantage of being targeted at the place where operator infrastructure investment would naturally be higher—metro.
To me, these positions raise the critical question of cost-leads or revenue-leads. Any contribution of new revenue or competitive advantage at the feature level would have a profound positive impact on the NFV benefit case. However, benefits are harder to develop and socialize when they’re secured way above the infrastructure capabilities and corporate culture of the operators. Both Alcatel-Lucent and Oracle seem to be working to ease operators into a service-benefit-driven vision by making the connection with mobile and IMS. They bring to the table a solid understanding of service PaaS and mobile. Ciena and Cyan bring a solid understanding of optical. We may now be in a race to see which camp can create a solid vision of operations, because that’s where the results of either approach will be tested most.
