I got over a hundred emails after my series on making the business case for NFV. A few didn’t like it (all of these were from the vendor community) but most who contacted me either wanted to say it was helpful or ask for a bit more detail on the process. OK, here goes. You…
What Has to Happen for Service Automation to Work
NFV is going to succeed, if we define success as having some level of deployment. What’s less certain is whether it will succeed optimally, meaning reach its full potential. For that to happen, NFV has to be able to deliver both operations efficiency and service agility on a scale large enough to impact operators’ revenue/cost…
Comparing the NFV Data-Model Strategies of Key Vendors
I think that most of my readers realize by now that I think the data modeling associated with NFV is absolutely critical for its success. Sadly, few of the players involved in NFV say much about their approach to the models, and I’ve not been able to get the same level of detail from all…
What’s the REAL Impact of Virtualization on Network Security?
When I was a newly-minted programmer I saw a cartoon in the Saturday Evening Post (yes, it was a long time ago!) A programmer came home from the office, tossed his briefcase on the sofa, and said to his wife “I made a mistake today that would have taken a thousand mathematicians a hundred years…
Why (and How) Infrastructure Managers are Critical in NFV Management
In a number of recent blogs I’ve talked about the critical value of intent modeling to NFV. I’d like to extend that notion to the management plane, and show how intent modeling could bridge NFV, network management, and service operations automation into a single (hopefully glorious) whole. In the network age, management has always had…
Why NFV’s VIMs May Matter More than Infrastructure Alone
Everyone knows what MANO means to NFV and many know what NFVI is, but even those who know what “VIM” stands for (Virtual Infrastructure Manager) may not have thought through the role that component plays and how variations on implementation could impact NFV deployment. There are a lot of dimensions to the notion, and all…
Why is Network-Building Still “Business as Usual?”
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…
The Technical Steps to Achieve Service Operations Automation
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…
Five NFV Missions that Build From Service Operations Success
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…
How an NFV Sales Story Can Get Wall Street “Tingly Inside”
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…