If we tried to come up with a phrase that expressed the carrier directions as expressed so far in their financials and those of the prime network vendors, a good suggestion would be “business as usual.” There’s been no suggestion of major suppression of current capital plans, no indications of shifts in technology that might…
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…
In my last blog I outlined an approach to making an NFV business case that was based on prioritizing service operations with legacy infrastructure. This, I noted, would provide a unifying umbrella of lifecycle services that NFV-based applications could then draw on. Since the operations modernization would have been paid for by service operations cost…
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…
We all believe that carrier networks are changing, and anyone who ever took a business course knows that industries are changed by changes in their profit picture or regulations. The business trends of the network operators is one of many issues that’s pushed under the rug when we talk about new technologies like SDN or…
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…
One of the recurring points I make in my blogs about SDN and NFV is the need for a business case. Most are aware that “business case” means a financial justification of an investment or project, but I’ve gotten some questions from some who’d like to understand a bit more about the process of “making”…
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…
Many of you have noticed the fact that my blog on the “missing NFV constituencies” of CIO and CFO was still missing a constituency or two. The ones I didn’t cover are the head of operations, and the CMO, and the reason I didn’t is that I was still massing the comments I’d had from…