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TCS to add NFV support for LBS, messaging platform

TCS claims NFV will produce greater agility, lower operating costs

Telecom equipment and service vendors continue to heed the call of virtualization, adopting software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and cloud technologies into their product offerings.

The latest is TeleCommunication Systems, which said by the end of the year it will offer NFV for all of its location-based and messaging technology solutions. The company said the move will allow its wireless operator and enterprise customers to virtualize “entire classes of network node functions into communication services that will cost-effectively run on common off-the-shelf, nonproprietary hardware platforms.”

“By migrating all of our best-in-class solutions to NFV, we will be able to make our software available at any time and on nonproprietary platforms, reducing costs and complexity,” said Jay Whitehurst, TCS commercial software group president. “This flexibility and agility will reduce customer costs, both [capital expense] and [operating expense]. Virtualizing our location-based and messaging platforms is a critical expansion vector for TCS as we can now serve a larger set of customers in a more cost-effective manner.”

TCS said its offering can be deployed using a cloud-based data center environment for both messaging and location solutions. The company added that it processes more than 7 billion LBS transactions per month and has processed more than 5 trillion text messages to date.

Analysts have recently highlighted the financial challenges of NFV deployments, with a report from ACG Research claiming opex savings gleaned from service innovation.

“A major advantage of SDN/NFV is in its opex, which gives the operators the ability to rapidly provision new services,” explained Robert Haim, principal analyst at ACG Research. “Service rollout is reduced by an order of magnitude of months to days. Moreover, with fast service rollout, a new service can be tested with a limited set of customers first, and then upon favorable feedback it can be introduced to the entire target market. This can save a lot of headache (and money) later if the service turns out to be not as well received as it was expected.”

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