In my last blog I outlined an approach to making an NFV business case that was based on prioritizing service operations with legacy infrastructure. This, I noted, would provide a unifying umbrella of lifecycle services that NFV-based applications could then draw on. Since the operations modernization would have been paid for by service operations cost reductions, NFV would not have to bear the burden. That would facilitate making the business case for individual applications of NFV, and at the same time unify these disconnected NFV pieces.
The obvious question stemming from this vision is just what NFV applications might then be validated. According to operators, there are 5 that seem broadly important, so let’s look at how these would benefit from the service operations umbrella.
The most obvious NFV opportunity that might be stimulated by service ops is virtual CPE or vCPE. This app is sometimes presented as a generalized-device-on-premises-hosted set of functions, sometimes as a cloud-hosted set, and sometimes an evolution from the first to the second. vCPE is fairly easy to justify as a managed service provider (one who uses third-party transport and links it to managed services and extra features) because agile service feature selection is a clear value proposition. Broader-based telcos might find the service interesting but lacking in the scope of benefits that would be needed to impact EBITDA.
A service operations umbrella would necessarily include a service portal, automatic provisioning and modifications of the service features, and self-care features. These features, coming to vCPE at no incremental cost, would make the application valuable to any operator for business services. It’s likely that efficient service operations could even make it useful to SMBs using consumer-like broadband connections. For some applications, including content (more on this later), home control and medical monitoring, vCPE could be justified all the way to the consumer.
A second NFV opportunity that’s already generating interest and even sales is virtualization of mobile infrastructure. Even for 4G/LTE services, operators are visualizing software-defined radio, self-optimizing elements, flexible topologies in the evolved packet core (EPC), and add-on services tightly coupled to IMS. 5G could increase the credibility of all of these applications, but particularly the latter.
Operations automation is critical for the success of any mobile infrastructure business case for NFV because mobile infrastructure is multi-tenant and so the dynamism of individual functions is limited. Most function deployment would come in response to changes in traffic load or as a response to an outage. Mobile infrastructure is going to be highly integrated with legacy equipment, but also with other services like content delivery and IoT.
What makes add-on services interesting is that IMS-mediated applications would likely be much more dynamic than core IMS or EPC components. You can imagine mobile collaborative applications involving content sharing or IoT integration with mobility as generating a lot of per-user or per-group activities. Content-viewer collaboration, sometimes called “social content”, is also a good application because it involves both the indexing and sharing of content clips and the socialization of the finds among a group, almost like collaboration.
The third opportunity area that service optimization would enable is elastic bandwidth and connectivity. The business key to services that tactically build on baseline VPNs or VLANs is that they don’t undermine the revenue stream of the base service. My research suggests that this can be done if such services are always tied to an over-speed access connection (which you need for delivery anyway), that they have a pricing strategy that encourages longer-term commitments rather than every-day up-and-down movement, and that they be invoked through a self-service portal that can not only offer capacity or new site connectivity on demand, but on a schedule or even if a management system detects certain conditions.
The differentiating point for this kind of service is its ability to augment private-network services and to do so at the same high level of availability and QoS. While those factors can’t really be guaranteed using NFV, the NFV-to-SDN tie could help assure it.
IoT is a fourth opportunity, though it’s more complicated to realize. As I’ve noted in other blogs, IoT is an application that demands harnessing of a large variety of already-deployed sensor/controller elements and their conversion into a data repository that can then be queried. It’s true that there may be new sensor/controller elements put online via 4/5G, but there are literally billions of devices already out there and a failure to enlist them in early applications would generate a major question of how new deployments would be capitalized and by whom.
The most significant value of IoT lies in its capability to provide context to mobile users, which is the basis for many valuable applications. You can visualize the world as an interlocking and overlaid series of information fields that users move through or to (or away from) and of which they are selectively aware. The information available can be about the physical area, traffic conditions, nearby events that might be of interest or create risk, commercial opportunities, and so forth. The information from a given user’s mobile device could guide the user’s path, and if a community of users are interacting the collective information of them all could help arrange meetings. Emergency responders and any worker-dispatch function could draw on the data too.
The final opportunity is tactical cloud computing, another activity that emerges from either physical or social mobility. One of the profound truths of IT spending by enterprises is that it has always peaked in growth when new productivity paradigms become visible. Mobility is likely to be the next opportunity for such a paradigm, because engaging the worker with information at the point of worker activity is the ultimate marriage of information processing and information delivery. But mobile workers are mobile and their information needs are tactical and transient, which isn’t ideal for traditional application computing models. It’s better for the cloud, particularly if elements of the application and data can be staged to follow the worker and anticipate the next mission.
It’s clear that this concept would grow out of business use of IoT, and it might also grow out of maturing collaboration models focused on mobile workers as well. It would probably be difficult to socialize it by itself, which is why I place it last on the list.
The big long-term opportunities for NFV are in the last two areas, and that’s an important point to make because it’s a validation of the premise of this whole exercise. To make shareholders happy is the primary mission of public-company business policy, and that for network operators means raising EBITDA, which means lowering opex significantly. You can’t do that except through broad changes in service operations, and you can’t justify broad changes with narrow service targets. Since broad service targets are too radical to start an NFV story with, you are stuck unless you decouple service operations from the rest of NFV and give it priority. We don’t have to forget NFV or pass on its real benefits, but we do have to apply the lesson it’s taught about orchestration to service operations first. Once that happens, then all the NFV priorities of various types of operators, all the customer directions they might follow, unite in a single technical framework that can propel NFV and operator business success. That’s the only way we’re going to get this done.