For decades, there’s been a view that a one-stop IT shop or full-service vendor was the best approach. Now it seems like nobody wants to be that any more. IBM, once the vendor with the largest strategic influence of any vendor, has seen its product line and customer base shrink. Dell and HPE seem to…
From almost the first meeting of the NFV Industry Specification Group, there’s been a tension between NFV and the cloud. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are almost indistinguishable from application components in the cloud, and so platforms like OpenStack or Docker and tools like vSwitches and DevOps could all be considered as elements of NFV implementation. …
In a couple of past blogs, I’ve noted that operations automation is the key to both improved opex and to SDN/NFV deployment. I’ve also said that to make it work, I think you have to model services as a series of hierarchical intent models synchronized with events through local state/event tables. The goal is to…
Is “the latest and greatest” always great? There are definitely many examples of fad-buying in the consumer space. In business, though, it would probably be a career-killing move to suggest a project whose only benefit was adopting “the latest thing”. That doesn’t mean that there’s not still a bit of latest-thing hopefulness in positioning new…
One of the useful trends in network services these days is the trend to retreat from the technology basis for a service and focus on the retail attributes. You can see this in announcements from operators that they’re supporting “network-as-a-service” or “self-service”, but in fact these same trends are a critical part of the “virtual…
The relationship between SDN and NFV has always been complicated and often a bit competitive. SDN had an early lead for mindshare and vendor support but NFV captured the media’s attention quickly and today it seems to be leading in the field of strategic interest to operators. However, nearly all the operators I’ve talked with…
All of the discussions of service modeling and management or operations integration that I’ve recently had beg the question of OSS/BSS modernization. This is a topic that’s as contentious as that of infrastructure evolution, but it involves a different set of players in both the buyer and seller organizations. Since operations practices and costs will…
I said in my last blog that starting from the top of in viewing next-gen services and infrastructure led to a refinement of operator-sponsored models for SDN/NFV deployment. In that blog, I took the process down to what I said was the critical point—the “Network Function” that replaces the TMF concept of a “Resource-Facing Service”…
We now have a number of public or semi-public operator architectures for their next-gen networks, and we’ve had semi-public vendor architectures for some time. The “semi-“ qualifier here means that there are a number in both spaces that are not explicitly NDA, but are nevertheless not particularly well described. We also have a number of…
Software-defined networking has a lot of potential, but we’ve learned in our industry that vague potential doesn’t create a revolution. More important than potential are the specific places where network operators see SDN creating a significant shift in capex. There’s still a lot of variation to contend with regarding exactly how soon these places will…