NFV continues to gain development and deployment momentum across the telecom space, with Oracle expecting big moves in 2017.
On this week’s “NFV/SDN Reality Check” we speak with Chris King, senior director of CSP products at Oracle, to discuss news surrounding the network functions virtualization space coming out of the recent Mobile World Congress event, and where Oracle sees progress and challenges in terms of continuing adoption of NFV by telecommunication operators.
As an example of the progress from this year’s MWC event, Huawei, China Mobile and the GSMA announced at MWC plans to work together on a joint project to build an assessment framework for achieving carrier-grade NFV reliability for the telecommunication industry. The organizations explained the project was designed to combine industry efforts to construct a scalable and comprehensive framework to support proactive, flexible and analytical network maintenance for telecommunication operators.
Coming out of what has become the mobile industry’s marquee event, King said he continues to see greater adoption of NFV and software-defined network principals from telecommunication operators. That trend witnessed larger operators last year make moves, with King saying he expects adoption to migrate further across the space this year.
“For the big operators I think we are going to see NFV really start to go and we will start to see some of these visions become reality,” King said.
Despite the overall positive outlook, King did note that despite the recent advances, significant challenges still remain in terms of broader adoption of NFV-based platforms by telecommunication operators. Those challenges include orchestration, with King noting the industry was beginning to see some progress on tackling the main point of that challenge, though issues continue to remain in terms of items around the periphery of the technology.
“How does orchestration work with the rest of the OSS/BSS estate. How does a hybrid network where aspects of it are virtualized and aspects aren’t,” King said. “Those kinds of challenges haven’t completely been worked out.”
Thanks for watching this week’s show, and make sure to check out our next “NFV/SDN Reality Check” when we speak with the TM Forum on its Open API initiative and how they will be used to accelerate a recently announced MEF partnership.
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