NFV and Openness

It’s been a busy couple weeks and I wanted to share some of the highlights. I had the pleasure of being a judge for an SDN Hackathon sponsored by Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Lightspeed Ventures where developers came together to learn about OpenDaylight and build functional and deployable ‘bite-sized’ SDN applications in only six hours. It was great to see industry visionaries there like ONUG co-founder Nick Lippis and OpenDaylight developer Madhu Venugopal take the time out of their busy schedules to help out a group of eager developers. It is amazing to see the power of the community -- people giving up their Saturdays to learn, to network and to support each other.

Last week I was in the midst of the carrier community at the Carrier Network Virtualization event in Palo Alto. I was on a panel with Alcatel-Lucent, Coriant and Ericsson to discuss “Openness and Collaboration” and afterwards fielded a lot of inquiries from equipment providers and carriers about OpenDaylight, the developer community and the project’s plans for accelerating SDN and NFV. I enjoyed thought-provoking presentations and speeches from networking veterans like Marc Cohn representing the Open Networking Foundation who said “NFV is not a technology but an architectural approach. It will be deployed everywhere.” He discussed the importance of NFV’s ability to enable carriers to deploy bandwidth on-demand and about how complementary OpenDaylight and ONF are.

I also really enjoyed hearing the stories presented by carriers. DT presented the work they are doing to test SDN controllers, with OpenDaylight next on the list. Ravinder Shergil of Telus talked about how multi-vendor interoperability is a critical requirement for SDN and NFV and that he sees open source projects like OpenDaylight playing a key role in solving this challenge.

One debate between carriers was whether cost (capex and opex) or agility (elasticity, time to market) was the primary reason to go to NFV. The group seemed to settle on the latter, with many forecasting that the winners now are those best able to trial and roll out innovative new services the fastest. SDN and NFV are critical to achieving fast velocity of new services.

Christos Kolias of Orange had one of the most compelling presentations at the show and talked about how software-oriented innovation, including open source, now allows companies like his to rapidly prototype and test new services to generate new revenue streams. He described two compelling use cases that Orange has already built and tested: vEPC and vCDN.

I'll share here my takeaways from the conference in case it's helpful to others:

• NFV is real. Carriers are serious; ignore at your peril. Yes, many things are uncertain, we are early in the development of this market, but this isn’t hype - there is a real market problem to be solved and many people are highly motivated to solve it.

• NFV is not niche. Almost every network function/use case is a target: mobile core, mobile base stations, home environment, CDNs, fixed access network etc.

• Open is critical. Many speakers discussed OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, OpenDaylight and/or OpenStack. Interoperability is key; carriers are leery of being trapped in a proprietary stack.

I hope this wrapup is helpful for those who might have missed these events and would love to hear other perspectives and takeaways. You can reach me on Twitter at @NeelaJacques or shoot me an email anytime!