The telecom industry needs to get out of the weeds of developing individual VNFs and focus more on driving automation in NFV orchestration, Verizon's Fred Oliveira said at Light Reading's NFV & Carrier SDN event.

"We spend most of our time managing the low-level VNFs, which are individual network elements, said Oliveira, a fellow in Verizon's Network Technology Planning group, in a video interview with Light Reading. "One of our challenges is moving away from that and describing a service that can be automated and deployed automatically."

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While more technologies and tools are emerging that will assist in driving automation of network services, challenges such as a lack of vendor interoperability remain. Oliveira said many vendors are delivering individual, proprietary products, but Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) can address this issue by working more closely with vendors in their development process.

Service providers are facing internal business culture challenges to NFV orchestration as well -- Oliveira said there's significant risk aversion in this environment in balancing the goal of delivering both new and reliable services. (See Verizon's Oliveira: VNFs Could Use a Rethink.)

"The opportunities that some of these changes will enable -- both in terms of efficiency and agility of delivering new services -- necessitates us taking some risks," said Oliveira. "Over time we'll have to adapt to potentially taking risks that might affect some of our reliability but I think we'll have to develop tools and mechanisms that will limit those risks."

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading