Bangkok--19 Nov--Weber Shandwick
By Shaul Rozen, Director Of Product Strategy Network Cloud Service Orchestration, Amdocs
Two years ago, when the first white paper outlining the benefits, enablers and challenges of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) was published, the immediate benefit of NFV for service providers was seen in terms of cost savings. Now, as the industry begins to trial services based on a virtualized network, the focus is shifting to business agility and fast time to market for new services, and not just reduced capital and operational expenditures.
As John Donovan, senior executive vice president of AT&T architecture, technology and operations recently told The Wall Street Journal, AT&T’s ability to more easily manipulate network equipment using software will mean that business customers can get a new service in just a couple days, instead of 60 to 90 days. Other services, such as increasing bandwidth for customers, will take minutes as opposed 30 to 45 days.
This is possible because NFV offers a new way to design, deploy, and manage network services. NFV decouples network functions ? such as policy and charging rules function (PCRF), firewall or deep packet inspection (DPI) and so on ? from proprietary hardware appliances, so they can run in a cloud software environment.
In fact, NFV is no less than a paradigm shift that will transform service providers’ networks from a pre-defined set of physical infrastructure components to a set of modular software building blocks. These building blocks can be created, combined and shuffled at will, creating new network services, turning today’s static networks into dynamic, elastic network clouds.
Until now, high network equipment cost and operational complexity have hampered service providers in their battle against more nimble over-the-top (OTT) competitors, who have set a new bar in terms of customer expectations for quick delivery of new services.
The adoption of NFV will help service providers meet this challenge. It will enable service providers to move from multiple proprietary devices to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers, shift from physical network installation and configurations to remote, automated software-based processes, and provide automated elasticity and scaling. This will bring a number of benefits in term of business agility, such as faster time to market for new services, faster time to revenue of existing services, the removal of cost barriers to niche services and the ability to leverage customers to cost-effectively validate new services.
But while NFV drives more flexibility and agility, it also introduces new management requirements, such as network resource allocation across network services, geographical distribution of services across data centers, governance of numerous, multi-vendor, autonomous, software network functions, and the extraction of business value out of these new network capabilities.
This creates a new need for automated service management and orchestration. A service can be made up of several, distributed virtual network functions (VNFs) and the network service orchestrator is in charge of ensuring that the entire service is installed and operational end-to-end, and in line with the service level agreement.
At Amdocs, we’ve just launched the Amdocs Network Cloud Service Orchestrator, an open, catalog-driven solution for service providers transitioning from physical networks to cloud service environments. The solution continuously designs, fulfills and assures network services, from any Virtual Network Function (VNF) vendor, over all mainstream cloud management systems and SDN controllers.
The open nature of the solution enables service providers to build and operate best-of-breed network services and avoid vendor lock-in, while its patent-pending technology revolutionizes the service operational model of separate service fulfillment and assurance by converging the two into a single, holistic process, providing achieve agile and lean network operations in a virtual and physical environment.
Its catalog-driven orchestration meanwhile links the business and the network, making it fast and easy to onboard new VNFs from new vendors, define new network service offerings, and to quickly and easily fulfill them. This will enable service providers to transform their networks into rich network service catalogs, from which customers can select, install and even design the services they want.
And to help further drive NFV adoption, Amdocs has also established an NFV service partner program, focused on pre-integrating a rich set of VNFs and network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) elements to simplify the complexity of service orchestration, improve service time to market and address end-to-end SLA considerations.
There are currently 21participating partners in the program, with more joining every week, and among the pre-integrated services available are virtual enterprise CPE, virtual IP Multimedia System (vIMS) core with enterprise value added voice service, and virtual mobile packet core (vMPC).
As service providers begin their journey to transform their networks, they are searching for proven solutions that will enable them to build best-of-breed network services while avoiding vendor lock-in, achieve agile and lean network operations, and rapidly introduce a multitude of new user-defined services. At Amdocs, our mission is to help our customers successfully navigate this major transformation into the new world of the virtual network.