IHS survey found more than one-third of carriers plan 2015 NFV deployments
A new report from IHS found that 35% of telecom operators are planning to deploy network functions virtualization this year, yielding yet more evidence that despite its still nascent nature, carriers are moving rapidly toward NFV and virtualization platforms.
The survey, “NFV strategies: global service provider survey,” included interviews with 22 “incumbent, competitive and mobile operators from [Europe, the Middle East and Africa], Asia Pacific and North America,” with IHS stating the operators represent 43% of worldwide telecom [capital expenses] and 39% of revenue.
More impressive, the survey noted “all major operators are either now deploying NFV or plan to within the next few years,” according to Michael Howard, senior research director for carrier networks at IHS, with 48% of carriers planning to evaluate NFV by the end of the year.
“Though we’re still in the early stages of a long-term transition to NFV [and software-defined networking] architected networks, many carriers will be moving from proof-of-concept tests and lab evaluations to commercial deployments of NFV in 2015,” said Howard. “Providers believe that NFV and its SDN companion are a fundamental change in telecom network architecture that will deliver benefits in service agility and new revenue, operational efficiencies and capex savings.”
One potential challenge for NFV vendors and carriers was the response that “barriers” to deployments become more apparent the closer an operator moves toward a commercial launch. Cited problems include products not being “carrier grade” and the training of qualified employees to handle the new virtualized environment.
IHS found virtual enterprise CPE, service chaining and virtual network platform-as-a-service were seen as the top use cases through the end of 2016.
A previous report from IHS – when it was known as Infonetics Research – predicted the global service-provider SDN and NFV markets would grow from less than $500 million in sales in 2013 to $11 billion in sales by 2018. Between the two technologies, Infonetics said it expected NFV to represent “the lion’s share” of the market between 2014 and 2018, with the value of NFV coming mostly from virtual network function software rather than orchestration and control. The research firm noted that VNF makes up more than 90% of the NFV software segment, and that it expects SDN and NFV software to comprise three-fourths of the total revenue in 2018.
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