Amdocs announced a strategy and ecosystem to enable further service virtualization by its customers. Within the announcement there are three topics which combined enable their strategic vision for an open network functions virtualization cloud.
The first new product is a Network Cloud Service Orchestrator or the “brains” of the solution. The solution is open, vendor-agnostic and catalog driven to enable operators to define and launch services containing virtual network functions across multiple vendors. Network services from any VNF vendor can be utilized via existing service catalogs and ordering systems over mainstream cloud management systems and software-defined network controllers in a hybrid physical/virtual environment. Consider a scenario where there is an “app store” of network functions available that impact the customers’ experience and you can understand why orchestration is so important.
Second is the NFV Service Partner Program. An ecosystem launched to improve time-to-market and support end-to-end service level agreement requirements. There are currently 21 partners in the program. Those mentioned in today’s announcement are Juniper Networks, Metaswitch Networks, Red Hat and Connectum.
What the program will bring to the table is:
- Multi-vendor integration and testing
- Development of best practices for use in service development and deployment
- Partner options categorized between VNF and NFV infrastructure organizations
- Pre-integrated solutions to drive faster implementation of end-to-end NFV environments and new revenue opportunities such as vCPE – enterprise connectivity and security services, vIMS – IMS core and enterprise voice services and vEPC – core mobile network services.
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The final topic addressed today is a Policy Controller claimed to be the industry’s first policy and charging rules function fully aligned with ETSI’s NFV industry specifications group blueprint architecture for management and orchestration. Some of the applications the policy controller VNF enables for operators are faster introduction of functionality such as voice over LTE and virtual packet core for the enterprise. In combination with a new orchestration-ready element manager there is now a single point of configuration and management across cloud and physical environments.
There are many moving parts in today’s announcement, but in summary Amdocs is working to not just virtualize the network but also services to provide an end-to-end virtualized option for operators.
Why is NFV so important today? From a time-to-market and cost perspective it’s becoming increasingly impossible for operators to keep up with rising end-user usage and performance demands with traditional network infrastructure solutions. Not only is the time to deploy lengthy, the cost to deploy is paramount. In an NFV scenario these factors can be somewhat mitigated.
But why is it taking so long? Standards are one of the key issues, and until the industry is settled on this topic operators will be hesitant to move forward. Analysts predict widespread deployment not until 2018 – 2020 due to this issue. Although ranked very high on a recent TM Forum study, this topic was outranked by lack of management tools. Over 60% of respondents felt this was the biggest challenge to date for NFV to become a reality. This reinforces the need for orchestration solutions and Amdocs announcements today.
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