Summary Bullets:

• Over time, we’ve seen operator thinking around NFV as a tool for saving money (OpEx and CapEx) vs. making money (new revenue generation) shift towards the latter.
• Most recently, operator and vendor messaging around NFV monetization was prominently on display at Layer 123’s NFV World Congress.
• The “savings vs. monetization” dynamic, however, is not an either/or decision, potentially confounding vendor agendas to drive broader thinking around monetization and service orchestration.

Last week, we released our wrap-up of insights from Layer123’s NFV World Congress. You can take a look at that analysis here: Layer123 NFV World Congress: Trying Hard to Find a Monetization Story for NFV. Included in that analysis was a potential contradiction. On the one hand, the event highlighted operator and vendor thinking around the use of NFV to generate new revenues vs. saving money on network rollouts and operations. On the other hand, specific network functions are often rolled out by individual business units with their own narrow agendas, which may not always include new revenue generation. One vendor, in particularly, framed this in terms of orchestration and business processes. Operators approaching NFV from an orchestration and business enablement standpoint, the vendor argued, are in a much better position to leverage the technology for truly evolving their networks vs. maintaining their current operations with new gear. In many cases, they continued, it’s been an uphill battle to get this message understood by operators looking at NFV in tactical terms. Continue reading “NFV World Congress: NFV Monetization vs. Network Pragmatism (aka the AT&T Paradox)” →

Summary Bullets:

• NFV is (largely) about hosting telecom applications on commercial IT servers. Today, those servers are powered by Intel-based processors.
• ARM-based servers represent an alternative; ARM-based processor vendors are beginning to message the value they can provide vs. incumbent offers.
• Whether or not operators are paying attention is unclear. They need to.

Just about a year ago, I was talking with a telecom infrastructure vendor executive about his NFV strategy when the topic of ‘vendor lock-in’ came up. While software portability promises (among other things) to help operators avoid vendor lock-in, the exec wondered if a reliance on Intel-powered servers meant that the industry was simply trading one form of lock-in for another. We both knew the problems with this sort of argument; after all, diverse vendors leverage Intel processors to build their own kit. No operators will be locked into a single source of servers. Regardless, I played along and asked if this meant that the vendor was developing ARM-based solutions. The answer? “No. Not until my customers begin asking for those types of solutions.” Continue reading “NFV World Congress: Why Carriers Need to Care About ARM-based Infrastructure” →

Summary Bullets:

• The hope for more rapid and successful integration than in the past to form the ‘New Nokia’ is predicated on, among other things, the advantages of ‘cloud computing.’
• If this means NFV, then such a hope may be a double-edged sword. Internally, NFV could help, while externally, New Nokia customers will have more choices than ever before.

After the initial furor of analysis and comment around the news of the proposed acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent by Nokia, much of the news flow has now subsided. Apart from the occasional justification from one or other of the CEOs from the approvals and regulatory perspective, the debate as to whether this acquisition will work any better than the mega-mergers of the past has largely been put into the ‘pending’ tray. Continue reading “Will Cloud Computing Really Help the New Nokia Succeed?” →