Top 5 NFV Movers & Shakers

Tier 1 Carriers Tackle Telco SDN

Telcos Turn Spotlight on Virtualization

Carriers Peer Into Virtual World

This Virtual World

NFV: Talk of the Town

One Problem With NFV

Ethernet Europe: Top 10 Takeaways

The Benefits of NFV

MW13: NFV Picks Up Speed

Orange Has High Hopes for NFV

New Group Ties NFV to the Cloud

Clouding Up the NFV Transition

NFV in the Cloud: It's Complicated

NFV: Set to Break the Big Box Brands

NFV Requires Redefined Reliability: AlcaLu

Forecasting the NFV Opportunity

5 Challenges for NFV in the 4G Core Network

SDN & NFV to Shake Up Operator OSS Market, Heavy Reading Finds

AT&T Puts SDN/NFV in Driver's Seat

Telefónica Preps NFV Trial

ETSI Publishes First NFV Specs

NFV Group Finds Its Feet

The SDN/NFV Integration Challenge

Timeline for NFV Still Hazy

TM Forum Sees Catalyst Role in NFV

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

Dr. Prodip Sen, director, Network Architecture, of Verizon Communications & chair, NFV ISG

Figure 1:

Sen's selection is obvious, as he was chosen to lead the group most responsible for creating and advancing NFV, and, in fact, is helping to keep that group quite focused on the topic at hand.

With only a two-year authorization, the NFV ISG is being asked to move at what is, at least for the telecom industry, the equivalent of warp speed (and remember, that only exists in Star Trek). In his role as the chair of the ISG, Sen is the man charged with keeping the many diverse views and divergent efforts from distracting the group from its goals.

Within its first 10 months, the group managed to produce its first set of specifications for how NFV will work and to engage the industry in developing proofs of concept for those specs. This was accomplished despite the fact that many technology suppliers are heading off in their own NFV directions, the latter being a trend typical of the sector and one that usually brings broad industry developments with lofty goals to a protracted halt.

Sen is striking the right balance, choosing not to engage in a detailed and time-consuming standardization effort that would bring the contrasting views of industry players into sharp conflict. He has not closed the door to input from other industry organizations and groups but is not allowing anyone else's agenda to slow down the NFV ISG's work.

Over the course of the next year, Sen will be challenged to maintain the focus on the original goals of NFV -- making networks more flexible in bringing services to market faster and reducing operational costs, while addressing challenges arising in the management and network orchestration layer.

Uwe Michel, network architect, CTO TAB, Deutsche Telekom & vice chair, NFV ISG

Figure 2:

Michel, like Verizon's Sen, is being chosen for his role on the ETSI NFV ISG, the organization driving forward the specifications for NFV. From the outset, he has been a vocal proponent of a carrier-driven strategy and one of the first to inject a sense of urgency into the proceedings.

Together with Sen, Michel represents well the international flavor of the NFV effort, as carriers from different markets, who haven't always worked in concert, attempt to do so here. More importantly, Michel has been pragmatic in addressing the opportunities and challenges of NFV, as he has acknowledged not only the need for NFV to enable network operators to break through any single-vendor stranglehold and enable applications from a wide range of independent developers, but also the threat to commercial interests that NFV represents for some (particularly hardware-centric) vendors.

Michel also represents one of the more aggressive movers on the virtualization front, which could well give him a voice of authority on the NFV ISG. Deutsche Telekom is making its migration to virtualization ahead of most Tier 1 operators, addressing not only the move to SDN and the deployed of virtualized network functions but also the shift to a next-generation OSS, the move many agree is the biggest challenge to virtualization.

In fact, DT is considered the service provider that most likely triggered the creation of the NFV ISG, which puts Michel in an interesting position as the group moves forward.

Margaret Chiosi, distinguished network architect, AT&T

Figure 3:

Margaret Chiosi was already very well known as a mover and shaker in the Carrier Ethernet world before she stepped into the NFV limelight as AT&T's representative on the NFV ISG. Chiosi is also known for her candor -- often on the cutting edge of change within the telecom space, she is willing to acknowledge the problematic realities of navigating change in the oft-staid carrier environment (often to the delight of contemporaries, if not always of her employer's media team).

Chiosi was in the foreground when SDN first blossomed as a trend in the carrier space, tightly tied to cloud networking services that were beginning to take hold: She was one of the first to publicly address the need for carriers to embrace SDN, a technology trend that grew up in the campus environment. So it made sense for her to be part of the leadership team on NFV, a complementary virtualization specification, and she was instantly outspoken about how the Tier 1 operators exploring the potential of NFV were engaging with the emerging concept in a pragmatic way. On more than one occasion, Chiosi has made it clear that she and her fellow NFV ISG members are not NFV cheerleaders but are determined to figure out whether NFV can truly deliver the many benefits attributed to it -- they want to be sure they're not backing an approach that will simply replace current frustrations, challenges and costs with others that are their equal, or worse.

AT&T's aggressive actions this fall have thrust Chiosi even further to the forefront, however. With its Supplier Domain Program 2.0, AT&T accelerated its move to SDN and NFV, pushing its vendors to help it move quickly to a cloud-based, all-IP network and to also enable reduced capital expenses.

While specifications from the ETSI group remain essential, nothing provides the same kind of incentives as major carrier contracts and Chiosi is now a leader in the carrier organization promising to put its money where its mouth is where virtualization is concerned -- as long as the right criteria are met, of course.

That's why when the very articulate Chiosi is talking, you'd better believe the industry is listening.

Tom Nolle, president, CIMI Corp., and chief architect, CloudNFV

Figure 4:

Nolle is a long-time industry analyst, known for his intelligence, his wit and his exotic vacations. (Ask him to show you the photos some time; he's also an excellent photographer.)

He admits that the CloudNFV consortium of network hardware and software vendors came together in a parking lot, outside an ETSI NFV ISG meeting, during which he became concerned about the way that the management and network orchestration (MANO) layer was being considered.

From those concerns grew an architectural approach that created two separate layers as part of a data model that supported a cloud implementation of NFV and went on to become part of the first proof of concept (PoC) to be formally proposed and accepted by the NFV ISG. Nolle initially brought together five industry vendors into the CloudNFV consortium -- 6Wind, Dell, EnterpriseWeb, Overture Networks and Qosmos -- but the group continues to grow.

And Nolle continues to spearhead its efforts and maintain a very public record of them as well, on the Cloud NFV website. In the process of this activity, which started in the spring of 2013, Nolle shone a bright light on what has become the acknowledged "greatest challenge" to virtualization's future in the public network -- the ability to effectively manage it and coordinate that management with legacy operations and billing support systems.

Part of what makes Nolle a mover and shaker in the NFV space is the very public way that CloudNFV is playing out and his willingness to engage in in-depth conversations and discussions around what is the latest network transformation trend in his distinguished career as a telecom industry analyst.

Martin Taylor, CTO, Metaswitch

Figure 5:

Taylor is the one-and-only vendor rep in our top five movers and shakers for a couple of key reasons. First, his company is actually offering a virtualized IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) via a cloud-based approach called Project Clearwater that, according to fellow mover and shaker, Tom Nolle, worked "right out of the box" in the CloudNFV demo in the fall of 2013. (See What's So Great About Open-Source IMS? and Metaswitch Formally Joins CloudNFV Effort.)

Metaswitch has also virtualized its session border controller (SBC).

In addition, Taylor has become a strong advocate for what you might call the "don't wait" mindset. He continually urges telecom network operators not to sit back and wait for NFV specifications or other industry initiatives to play out when there is action they can take today to make their networks better able to deliver competitive services.

Waiting for everything to be perfect before starting -- which Taylor likens to "boiling the ocean" -- is not a strategy that helps telecom companies under fire from OTT players, app developers, and Internet giants. What Metaswitch has laid out is an approach to moving now and continuing to evolve. (See Bolder Is Better for IP Transformation.)

That attitude, along with high levels of credibility and industry respect, has helped Metaswitch be heard in what is a very noisy sector, and Taylor is once again likely to make himself heard in 2014 as his team takes the adaptations to Clearwater that have come from the open source community and offers a hardened release of the virtualized IMS code to network operators seeking to efficiently deliver services such as voice-over-LTE (VoLTE).