Alcatel-Lucent has collected a number of important NFV deals recently. The company won a pair in China (China Mobile and China Unicom) and also won an expanded deal with European innovator Telefonica. There seems to be a common element in these deals—voice services and mobility. I think that says a lot about NFV and how…
In the idealistic vision of the future network (a vision I still hope can be realized), NFV forms an operational- and feature-enhancing umbrella over SDN to create agile services that improve efficiency and add greater value than the basic connection services of today. This vision would require some significant expansions in scope for NFV; primarily,…
Over the holiday weekend I got an email from a network operator friend who offered a comment on the state of SDN and NFV. The point was simple; it’s not completely accurate to say that the PoCs and trials so far have validated either SDN or NFV functionality. The reason isn’t that these efforts have…
I guess that like many out there, I regard Cisco announcements with a mixture of interest and cynicism. I remember well the times when Cisco would announce a “five-phase strategy” that was (whatever the technology focus) always something that they were already in Phase Two of and never something that was actually delivered in “Phase…
SDN and NFV, meaning “network virtualization”, is obviously going to have a significant impact on networking overall, even parts of networking that might not seem to be obvious targets. We’ve had some announcements and M&A that illustrate this, and that offer us a chance to think about just how profoundly network virtualization could change things….
I’ve commented in a number of my blogs that the standards process for both SDN and NFV have failed to address their respective issues to full effect. The result is that we’re not thinking about either technology in the optimum way, and are at risk for under-shooting the opportunities both could generate. There are some…
Red Hat’s deal with Samsung to co-develop mobile applications for business (and of course for Red Hat and Samsung hosting) mirrors in many ways a deal made last year between Apple and IBM. As I said in an earlier blog, I think it’s very likely that the next wave of productivity improvement that will drive…
The end game for any new technology is deployment based on business value, and I’ve noted many times that the biggest challenge faced by NFV is getting out of the lab and into the network. That’s now starting to happen, at least as a small step, through a Masergy service called Virtual f(n). It’s not…
One of the persistent challenges SDN and NFV have faced is the conflict between their “revolutionary” label and the pedestrian applications that tend to come to light. While there’s much new and different that could be done with either technology, most of what is done looks an awful lot like what you could do with…
SDN and NFV security are issues that rank high with network operators and users, but “security” is an issue that ranks high with everyone and ranking doesn’t always equate with rational action. Of 48 operators I’ve talked with over the last six months, all place SDN and NFV security among their top three issues. Enterprises,…