“The bundling and selling of vertical silos won’t work anymore”, according to Fran Heeran, Vodafone’s head of network virtualization, SDN and NFV. This quote is from Heeran’s keynote speech at the SDN and NFV World Congress in The Hague.
By Erik Larsson
More details in this article by SDxCentral: “From transport to customer experience, we are rebuilding our networks and applications to be more componentized,” Heeran said. “Vendors would, in the past, package hardware and software together. In this horizontal world, we’re splitting that. The bundling and selling of vertical silos won’t work anymore.”
This is the exact vision described in the original white paper published in October 2012 by a group of service providers, as part of an ETSI working group.
It is also perfectly in line with Enea’s strategy of providing software components in the form on NFV platforms, based on open-source, cost-efficient and optimized for high-performance.
A perfect example is Enea NFV Access, a lightweight virtualization software platform for customer premise deployment. It features high networking performance with optimized dataplane, mixed virtualization technologies (optimized KVM and/or Docker containers), and complete VNF lifecycle management. The objective is to create a foundation for vCPE agility and innovation, reducing cost and complexity for computing at the network edge.
Conversations at the SDN and NFV World Congress confirm that vCPE vendors are keen to source lightweight NFVi software from a specialist; this speeds up time to market and allows them to focus their own resources on building the complete CPE solutions.
Additional value can be created with Service Function Chaining (SFC), which has become central to any vCPE strategy: operators want their customers to be able to create and customize their own vCPE service combinations, based on stitching together various Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).
This is made possible by Enea software components such as:
Systems integrators and solution vendors can leverage these software components to enable intelligent, dynamic service chaining for Gi-LAN, SD-WAN or vCPE.
The future is here… and it is based on components: for operators and for vendors, this means more flexibility, increased business agility, and better cost-efficiency!
