NFV is turning out to be a lot more complicated than it first appeared, and that’s particularly true in the area most critical to vendors—the business case. While the question of making a broad business case for NFV is weeding out a lot of secondary players, it’s not deciding a market leader yet. In fact, it’s not even clear what a winning strategy will be. We have three options out there, and now’s a good time to look at them.
What most operators want from NFV is what I’ll call a systemic model for deployment, something that can justify a broad commitment to NFV (and almost always SDN, collaterally) and bring NFV to the largest collection of services and customers. The average operator I’ve talked with thinks that systemic NFV could touch as much as 75% of all customers.
In order for systemic NFV to work, you have to be able to deliver operations efficiencies and service agility, because operators (particularly CFOs) say that capex improvements won’t create enough momentum or even fully justify NFV complexity. That means you need to extend ETSI-modeled NFV both into legacy infrastructure and into OSS/BSS orchestration. You also have to be able to host a large number of diverse VNFs.
From a sales perspective, systemic NFV is definitely a “hang in there” proposition. The sheer scope of the success goal means that nearly everyone who signs anything will have to sign off on systemic NFV. IT will touch every piece of the network, every major vendor, every craft practice and operations/management software tool. It’s also so big that it’s hard to grasp it, and many proponents of this model are trapped in small-scale on-ramp projects that might or might not lead to a realization of the broad goal.
The second approach to NFV success is the magic bullet model. Rather than trying to build up NFV to a broad base through a wide range of services, magic-bullet proponents seek to identify a killer app, a single service that has so profound a benefit case that it can carry NFV into deployment by itself. Once this app has greased the NFV skids, other applications can then follow along.
Magic bullets, to succeed, have to be both accurate enough and massive enough, and that’s the current rub. The obvious candidate for a magic-bullet attack is mobile services, because mobile infrastructure is still the capex focus. It’s easier to deploy a new technology where money is still being spent on a large scale, than to displace already-bought stuff elsewhere. The question is whether mobile is the right target.
The risks of mobility lie in extensibility in the service domain. Yeah, we can apply NFV to manage costs in mobile networks, and perhaps even to improve operations efficiency, but service agility goals demand hypothetical services. IMS and EPC are candidates for early NFV exploitation, but they’re specialized multi-tenant applications. Services built to demonstrate agility would have to be built both on IMS and on NFV to be relevant, and right now we use both IMS and NFV only for efficient hosting—we don’t have a model of service-building.
The third NFV strategy is what I’ll call (given my penchant for quoting old poems and music) the September-Song approach. “…I let the old earth take a couple of whirls…” is the relevant theme. Septemberish NFV advocates are essentially saying that NFV is inevitable, that somebody will hit on the magic formula for deployment. That somebody will then spawn explosive NFV growth, which will create an explosive growth in demand for something NFV consumes a lot of—servers, data center switches, software licenses.
It you’re a platform (server, OS) vendor, there’s something said for the wait-and-see approach, because 1) you don’t have to go out and create and merchandise a full NFV solution and 2) you don’t face the risk of alienating the players who do manage to make a business case. It’s a kind of arms-merchant approach to the NFV wars, because you have something everyone will need.
The obvious problem the Septemberists face is the risk that an NFV magician who’s able to make the business case will sell servers and software too. That could happen both for a systemic NFV player or a magic-bullet player, and the result would be that Septemberists would have to fight their way into a deal whose business case is under the control of another vendor.
We’ve had examples of competitive evolution for all these approaches recently, which I think proves that none of them are off the table yet. That also means none are winning convincingly.
HP is the paramount player in the systemic camp. Their OpenNFV has legacy device orchestration, OSS/BSS and NMS integration, a strong ecosystem, a good on-boarding model, and good engagement in a variety of trials to prove out service breadth. Their problem has been that they’ve become perhaps a bit obsessed with the trials and have underplayed their systemic assets. That’s easy to do because it’s hard to make something like NFV operations efficiency exciting. In the service agility area, services are VNFs and you can’t be seen to favor a given partner if you’re a partnership-driven ecosystem.
HP doubled down on VNF partnerships this week with a big NEC announcement. One thing this shows is that larger players like NEC see HP as a viable platform going forward, an endorsement that’s likely to play well with operators and with other prospective partners. But the press release on the deal didn’t mention any specific services, which means that it doesn’t add a lot of near-term impetus to HP’s drive.
In the magic-bullet class of NFV player, Alcatel-Lucent has been making news through NFV-ready IMS and IMS-related offerings. A highly focused mobile drive has given Alcatel-Lucent a presence even in accounts where another vendor (HP, for example, with Telefonica) already had a win. Alcatel-Lucent has, in its Rapport collaboration framework, an application platform to facilitate service creation that’s NFV- and IMS-compatible, and so it addresses the limitations of early mobile-service targeting I noted above.
The challenge is that platforms do not a service make. IMS has been a theoretical platform for rich communications services for a decade and it’s not killing off OTT competitors. Part of the problem is that it’s not entirely clear what platform capabilities Alcatel-Lucent’s Rapport and IMS actually bring to service developers or VNF developers, nor is it clear how NFV and IMS cooperate to be greater than the sum of the parts. Alcatel-Lucent needs to make all that clear.
The Septemberist giant is of course Intel. An optimal deployment of NFV could generate over a hundred thousand new data centers, ten times that number of new servers, and a heck of a lot of new CPU chips. Intel is the clear leader to pick up the NFV financial marbles because they’re a part of almost any credible winning strategy.
To address some of the risks on the platform side, Intel has been pushing its Wind River Titanium Server strategy, and recently won a Nokia validation that might signal a firm link with the leading magic-bullet player—Alcatel-Lucent—when/if the Alcatel-Lucent/Nokia deal closes. Wind River is also a platform partner for systemic leader HP.
For all of this, Intel still hasn’t taken a step toward making the business case. Yes, they have the right hardware to deploy NFV. Yes they have the right software platform. They don’t contribute much to the direct business case, though, and so they are still at risk for a slow-roll NFV that undershoots potential, or the introduction of a competitor who is able to take advantage of the slow roll to get into the game.
So where does this leave us? I think that it will be difficult, though not impossible, for any player—even HP—to make a pure systemic run at the NFV opportunity. It’s probably too late to socialize that complex story, though I think they need to try. I think that mobile is going to be hard to use as a truly universal magic bullet because it doesn’t hit enough operators, and doesn’t hit hard enough to push universal adoption, unless you build a service framework on it. And I think that waiting for somebody else to win and hoping to ride on their coat-tails is always an unacceptable risk.
Something evolving from mobile has to be the answer, and I think that “something” is the always-overplayed Internet of Things. All three of our giants are trying to come to terms with a real IoT architecture, and I think that whoever wins it can win NFV too, as long as they make what should be the obvious connections. That would create a truly massive win, perhaps the largest in networking since the early days of IP convergence.