Author: Tom Nolle

I got over a hundred emails after my series on making the business case for NFV.  A few didn’t like it (all of these were from the vendor community) but most who contacted me either wanted to say it was helpful or ask for a bit more detail on the process.  OK, here goes. You…

I think that most of my readers realize by now that I think the data modeling associated with NFV is absolutely critical for its success.  Sadly, few of the players involved in NFV say much about their approach to the models, and I’ve not been able to get the same level of detail from all…

In a number of recent blogs I’ve talked about the critical value of intent modeling to NFV.  I’d like to extend that notion to the management plane, and show how intent modeling could bridge NFV, network management, and service operations automation into a single (hopefully glorious) whole. In the network age, management has always had…

If the concept of service operations automation is critical to NFV success and the NFV ISG doesn’t describe how to do it, how do you get it done?  I commented in an earlier blog that service operations could be orchestrated either within the OSS/BSS or within MANO.  The “best” place might establish where to look…

Remember from yesterday’s blog that the goal of an NFV business case should be to “make the Street all tingly inside.”  That means that NFV’s business case has to be made in two interdependent but still separate tracks—one to justify new capex with high ROI and the other to create an opex-improving umbrella to improve…

If there’s a front line for NFV, that front line is the sales effort.  Since I’ve started to blog about the difficulties associated with making the NFV business case, I’ve gotten a lot of comments from salespeople who are charged with the responsibility of doing that.  I’ve tabulated just shy of 30 of these, and…

I’ve noted in the past that it’s proven difficult to make a business case for NFV.  Rather than address that point now, I propose to ask “But what if it can?”  Remember that while I’m unimpressed (to say the least) with efforts to paint a plausible picture to justify NFV deployment, I believe firmly that…

Vice presidents of operations at the network operators, especially the telcos, think that the solution to NFV silo risk is to do a better job of “federation”.  That term is one often used to describe the interconnection of elements across administrative or technical boundaries.  If a network isn’t built in a truly homogeneous way, then…

Open architectures for IT have a profound impact on the sales process.  In the old days, when a vendor sold a complete proprietary IT ecosystem, you pitched your benefits holistically and when you won you won it all.  When things shifted to an open framework, with COTS servers and Linux operating systems, the “sale” was…

I blogged earlier this week about the “fall planning cycle” for network operators, and the issues and forces associated with that cycle this year.  An obvious follow-on question is how vendors will be impacted by the cycle.  Will some be hurt by events, others helped, and is there still time to move yourself from the…