In a couple blogs last week I was critical of Alcatel-Lucent’s positioning of a new product (NSP) and their expressions of SDN/NFV opportunity in a white paper done in conjunction with AD Little. I also raised questions about their positioning overall, and their ability to deliver on SDN/NFV benefit needs. I had a chance to talk at length with them about their portfolio, and the good news is that they have a lot better technology than I thought. The bad is that they’ve been presenting it even more inconsistently than I’d feared.
NFV poses a lot of vendor challenges, and one we don’t often think about is that it can cross over product-group boundaries. A complete NFV implementation that does everything I think is essential would have to include operations tools, NFV MANO and VNFM, a VIM/NFVI strategy, SDN, and legacy device control via something. You’d also likely need some VNFs. However, an ETSI-compliant NFV implementation could need only the MANO/VNFM/VIM/NFVI story. Almost every NFV supplier out there takes a holistic view of NFV and touts as many things as they have from my full list. What I’ve found out is that Alcatel-Lucent doesn’t do that, which means that if you look at their NFV material you don’t see things that operators and I would all put into the NFV story. You’d think Alcatel-Lucent didn’t have the stuff, in fact.
If you want to see a complete picture of NFV from Alcatel-Lucent, there is one, but you don’t find it in NFV material. Instead you have to look at Motive and in particular SURE, and neither of these is easy to find on the company website or easy to connect with either Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN or NFV strategy. Here’s some helpful links to save you the problems I had! Motive is HERE and SURE is HERE.
Motive is the family of products that Alcatel-Lucent aims at service management and operations. If you look at the components of Motive you see all the familiar operations stuff but you don’t see specific links to emerging critical technologies like SDN, NFV, and the cloud. It’s not that they aren’t there, but you have to dig even deeper, into the modeling approach itself, which is SURE. There’s a little blurb on Sure on the Alcatel-Lucent site, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface. I got some slides on it but they’re NDA, so I’ll have to try to verbalize.
SURE is the acronym for Motive Service and Unified Resource Engine, which the company presents as a “data model” but which is in effect an operations architecture. An Alcatel-Lucent slide on SURE shows it as being a TMF-modeled service management framework that actually looks quite a bit like the package that Oracle has announced as an SDN strategy. Interestingly, Alcatel-Lucent’s SURE is actually a bit more modern and arguably more complete even than Oracle’s, even though Alcatel-Lucent seems not to present it in an NFV/SDN context.
My secret slides show SURE as a data model that integrates the Motive components with services and with each other. SURE and Motive create a complete service management framework that includes both customer-facing service (CFS) and resource-facing service (RFS) models that correspond to the TMF modeling and also generally to my own CloudNFV and ExperiaSphere models of a service and resource domains. The models that make up services are “fractal” in that either CFS objects or RFS objects can decompose into lower-level objects of the same type. CFSs can also cross the service/resource border and link to RFSs that then commit the resources.
Under the SURE model structure, Alcatel-Lucent explicitly places SDN, NFV, and legacy elements. Each of these is represented by what could be called a resource or infrastructure manager. I think that would suggest that each could then be considered the realization of an RFS. You could organize, orchestrate, and manage hybrid SDN/NFV/legacy services with the SURE/Motive approach, which raises two interesting questions.
The first and most obvious question is why Alcatel-Lucent doesn’t tout this in their SDN and NFV positioning. I was able to find the Motive approach on their website only with some difficulty after knowing it existed and what it was called. I didn’t get any comment from operators on Motive in association with SDN/NFV, and in fact a couple of operator transformation plans I just received outline an almost perfect mission for Motive and identify vendor candidates, but don’t list Alcatel-Lucent among them. SURE, which should be the heart of an Alcatel-Lucent SDN/NFV positioning, gets perhaps a paragraph on the website, and its description isn’t even all that helpful.
I don’t want to get hung up on the lack of positioning, though I think the fact that key operator staff don’t even know about the stuff demonstrates there’s an issue. With Motive and SURE, Alcatel-Lucent is surely superior to Oracle and nibbling at the functional heels of (IMHO) market leader HP. There’s enough substance here for Alcatel-Lucent to drive an effective NFV engagement and to take rational NFV services to field trial and deployment. Not many vendors can say that.
The second question is whether an approach like this (which Oracle also takes) that separates OSS/BSS orchestration from whatever goes on in NFV/MANO is better than one that integrates orchestration across everything that needs orchestrating. It’s an unfair question at one level because the NFV ISG doesn’t consider operations or legacy network elements in-scope, though it seems to be expanding at least its legacy strategy for connections in association with NFV deployment. If the standard doesn’t consider broad orchestration a goal, you can’t fault vendors for not broadly orchestrating.
Well, maybe you can. I think that there are significant advantages to be gained from a common data modeling from the top of a service to a bottom. This structure means that all of the tools for modeling and linking process elements are common, which means that it’s easy to make a model hierarchical. If you have to cross modeling approaches, you first have to define an open boundary and second have to insure that you have everything you need passed across it. Even then there is a concern that you may have different visibility/management tools at different places.
Despite the possible benefits of a common model, vendors who have it seem to be uneasy about trotting it out in association with NFV. I suspect the issue comes down to sales. The value of a common model is linked to broad application of orchestration. If you have engagement in the NFV PoCs, do you want to expand the scope of your effort to involve new carrier constituencies and potentially new and complicated issues? Or do you want to press forward, order-book in hand?
The problem is that I don’t think that blind momentum on current PoCs is going to take operators, or NFV, where we need to go. I think it’s going to take harmonized efforts involving operations, the cloud, SDN…and NFV. We can’t get those efforts if all the pieces except NFV are walled off. Silos are what we’re trying to get rid of, so we don’t need to invent a philosophical siloing level for our key technologies.
Alcatel-Lucent has other hidden-gem assets, some of which I’ve seen demonstrated in a very impressive way. Their virtual IMS and Rapport strategy is exceptionally strong I think, and could be easily coupled with a strong NFV and operationalization positioning. You can get all of that with the right combination of people but not on the website or in any public marketing material.
The whole is supposed to be greater than the sum of the parts, which is true in Alcatel-Lucent’s sense but hard to determine given that the parts are difficult to locate. While Alcatel-Lucent is far from the only vendor to have under-positioned their NFV-and-SDN-related assets, they have more to lose by doing so. I saw, at an HP event this week, a broadening of NFV scope and positioning. Given that HP is Alcatel-Lucent’s primary functional rival in NFV, Alcatel-Lucent needs to start singing their own multi-product song—in harmony.