You always hear about service agility as an NFV goal these days. Part of the reason is what might cynically be called “a flight from proof”; the other benefits touted for NFV have proven to be difficult to validate or to size. Cynicism notwithstanding, there are valid reasons to think that agility at the service…
Cisco has always been known for aggressive sales strategies and cynical positioning ploys. Remember the day of the “five phase plan” that was always in Phase Two when it was announced (and that never got to Phase Five)? When SDN and NFV came along, Cisco seemed to be the champion of VINO, meaning “virtualization in…
One of the questions that seems to get asked annually is “When Google is going to build its own network?” After all, Google has deployed fiber in some areas, and from time to time it’s said it was going to bid on mobile spectrum. Is it just a matter of time for Google to take…
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…