Faction looks at evolving world of multicloud environments, and AT&T chairs OPNFV advisory group to provide tech guidance to NFV community
On this week’s show we have a featured interview with Faction to discuss some advantages of multicloud environments for telecom operators and enterprises.
First let’s take a look at some top headlines from across the space over the past week.
OPNFV recently formed its End User Advisory Group tasked with providing technical guidance to the OPNFV developer community working to bring NFV platforms to the telecom space. The advisory group is made up of end-user organizations from OPNFV members and nonmembers.
Representatives include AT&T, British Telecom, CableLabs, China Mobile, China Unicom, Cox Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Fidelity Investments, Liberty Global, KDDI, Orange, SK Telecom, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telia Company and Vodafone Group.
AT&T’s Steven Wright, who is lead member of the technical staff at the carrier, is chair of the group, serving a two-year term. The members are set to provide guidance to OPNFV governing bodies, which includes its Technical Steering Committee, Boards of Directors, and Certification and Compliance Committee.
The group is scheduled to meet monthly, with the first meeting having taken place on June 26, and the next scheduled for Aug. 31. OPNFV said the meetings entail discussions on key challenges, standards, network architecture and emerging use cases related to NFV.
Also this week, a new report from IHS Markit showed a vast majority of service providers remain on track to begin NFV deployments beginning next year.
The report found 81% of service providers surveyed said they plan to deploy NFV by the end of next year, with 100% of those questioned indicating they will deploy NFV “at some point.” Showing the market’s desire to roll out NFV platforms, the survey also found 58% of operators have deployed or will deploy NFV this year.
These early NFV deployments are expected to focus on virtualized enterprise customer premise equipment, which has seen increased importance over the past several years. IHS noted these deployments are favored due to the ability to assist with revenue generation as they allow operators to replace physical CPEs with software so they can quickly innovate and launch new services.
In terms of continuing challenges, IHS found integrating NFV into existing networks remains an issue for a majority of service providers surveyed, with many citing a lack of “carrier grade” products. That concern is similar to what was expressed in an IHS survey from last year, which supplanted previous concerns over operations and business support systems.
For this week’s featured interview, we spoke with Faction CEO Luke Norris, to get some background on the company and discuss some advantages of multicloud environments for telecom operators and enterprises.
Make sure to check us out again for our next show when we are scheduled to speak with Lenovo Networking on its recent move to join OPNFV and expanding its partnership with Red Hat to enable telco solutions.
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