The future of networking, like the future of practically everything else, is largely dictated by return on investment, meaning the balance of costs and revenues for all the players. I think 2017 is going to be a pivotal year, in no small part because network operators have predicted this will be the year where their…
One of the most important elements in service provider transformation is hardly ever talked about. It’s the portal that would provide users and operator personnel with access to information. Since service automation is the critical goal of transformation, and since there clearly has to be a different approach when communicating with an automated lifecycle process,…
Virtual functions and NFV are all about virtualizing network features, right? Well, perhaps not. There is increased interest in looking at application components as virtual functions, and this trend might be critical in justifying the carrier cloud, and even in supporting NFV’s narrower goal. It might not be too much of a stretch for current…
I almost hate to do a blog on what 2017 holds for networking, and for network operators in particular; that kind of analysis is almost a cliché. In this case, though, it might be important to look ahead to the coming year because it could include some fairly cataclysmic events and changes. At least I…
Like most players in the network space, Nokia is eyeing SDN and NFV with a mixture of hope and fear. I’d guess for Nokia it may be a bit more of the latter, because major changes in the market could upset the merger of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, the latter being an example of almost perpetual…
Every network operator I’ve surveyed has some sort of wholesale/retail relationship with other operators. Most fit into two categories—a relationship that extends geographic scope or one that incorporates one operator’s service inside another (like backhaul or MVNO). Given this, it is natural to assume that services built on SDN and/or NFV would have to be…
Cisco probably didn’t surprise too many people with its announcement that it was shutting down its Intercloud public cloud business. It’s been a stretch from the first, an attempt by Cisco to get parity with other IT players like IBM and HPE, both of whom have diddled with or exited their public cloud positions. You…
Whatever else you have, or think you have, the NFV business case will depend on software automation of the service lifecycle. VNFs matter functionally, but only if you can operationalize them efficiently and only if they combine to drive carrier-cloud adoption. The core of any justification for NFV deployment in the near term is operational…
If we need to apply advanced cloud principles to virtual network functions (VNFs), what exactly would that mean for VNF design, onboarding, and management? This is an important question because the current VNF onboarding process is broken from the operators’ almost universal perspective. Management, in my own view, is at least as broken. Fixing these…