Responding to a LinkedIn comment on one of my recent blogs, I noted that SDN and NFV had to focus now on not falling prey to the ATM problems of the past. It’s worth starting this week by looking objectively at what happened with ATM and how SDN and NFV could avoid that (terrible) fate. …
I was talking yesterday with an old friend from the network operator space, a long-standing member of the NFV elite, and one of our topics was just what could pull through SDN and NFV. Two specific notions came up, one the Internet-of-Things opportunity I mentioned a number of times in my blogs (yesterday, for example)…
If you go to the website of a big vendor who sells a lot to the network operators, or read their press releases, you see something interesting. The issues that these vendors promote seem very pedestrian. We hear about things like “customer experience”, “unified services”, “personalizing usage”, “traffic growth”, “outages”, and even “handset strategies”. Where’s…
I’ve pointed out in a number of my past blogs that of all the things needed from an SDN or NFV implementation to make the business case, none tops an effective service management automation approach. I’ve also noted that the NFV ISG initially put end-to-end management out of scope, and that they also ignored the…
The news that Cisco and Ericsson are forming a marketing partnership isn’t a big surprise, given the Nokia deal for Alcatel-Lucent earlier. It’s still big news in the industry, though, and perhaps bigger if one casts it into position alongside another news item, which is that Verizon is looking to sell off its cloud business. …
I got a laugh at a conference back in the past when I commented that to the media, any new technology had to be either the single-handed savior of western culture, or the last bastion of international communism. Anything in between wasn’t going to generate clicks on the pieces, and it was too complicated to…
Suppose you’re a network operator and you want to run an NFV trial. You need to make a business case to justify a considerable NFV program. Given all of the difficulties that you know others have faced, what do you do? This is a nice question to end a week on, so let’s look at…
Light Reading posted an interesting article on the commitment of network operators to NFV despite uncertainty about how they’d be expected to integrate with OSS/BSS. There are some parallels between the comments made and my own interactions with the operators, but I’ve also had some discussions about the issue at greater depth, and I want…
If you’ve tracked both SDN and NFV carefully, as I have, you’ve probably noticed that the value propositions for both have shifted or evolved over time. Service revenue increases are great, but you have to be able to justify them with some hard opportunity numbers. Where are the brass rings with new SDN and NFV…
There is no doubt that virtual CPE is the most populist of the NFV applications. There are more vendors who support it than any other NFV application, and more users who could potentially be touched by it. vCPE is also arguably the most successful NFV application, measured by the number of operators who have actually…