If there is a winner in the sad commoditization of networking, it’s surely Huawei. Their sales have climbed steadily as everyone else struggles or ties into narrow market niches. They’ve won a lot of battles in legacy networking, but that doesn’t mean it’s all beer and roses from here on. Three reports of their Operations Transformation Summit that Light Reading cited HERE, HERE, and HERE show that all vendors (even Huawei) have threats, and also opportunities to exploit new areas. Most of all, they show that the industry is slowly realizing that we have a long way to go to “transformation”.
SDN and NFV are the big news in network technology, promising a whole series of benefits but posing a pretty significant infrastructure churn as the price. The theory of both is that the old model of networking, based on switches and routers and devices in general, would be displaced by a server-hosted model. Since Huawei is clearly winning (and winning big) with the old model, it might be surprising that they’ve also been pushing transformation to something new.
So have other vendors, of course. Cisco, Nokia, Ericsson, Juniper…almost every network equipment vendor you can name has talked transformation that was really a substitution of software functionality for hardware. The dualism of their positioning has frustrated me for sure, because it seems like they’ve been blowing kisses at change while hoping it will just go away. Network operators have been telling me for a year that they are also frustrated with the wishy-washy positioning of their suppliers. The first of the two Light Reading references, from an event Huawei hosted, shows that even Huawei is the target of criticism for their lack of a decisive stand—by some of their customers.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that this week I’ve done some blogs that add up to recommending a shift of direction. There is a current challenge for operators, a challenge of a shrinking gap between revenue per bit and cost per bit. SDN and NFV were supposed to reopen the gap, but I’m now of the view that can’t happen in time. My proposal is to forget infrastructure transformation as a solution to the current critical problem, and focus instead on operations transformation. That will get operators over the hump, and fund the next step, which is to address the transformation of services from dumb connectivity to smart experiences. To do that, you focus not on SDN and NFV but on the carrier cloud.
This leads us to the second story out of the conference, which talks about the debut of the OPEN-O initiative. OPEN-O is seen by many as simply a competitor of Open Source MANO (OSM), but Huawei speaker Joe Hou says that “OSM is focused on MANO and NFV, whereas OPEN-O covers cloud and the data center as well.” Would it then be fair to say that OPEN-O differs in that it offers at least partial support for carrier cloud?
I think this issue of a cloud transition point is the core of the frustration that operators feel. No operator I’ve ever talked with actually wants to transform infrastructure—it’s too expensive and presents too much risk. What they’d really like is to transform costs and revenues without having to do a lot of infrastructure fork-lifting. The goal of OPEN-O, which the article says is “helping telcos shorten time-to-market for new service provisioning from an average of between six and eight weeks to just one week,” could also be said to address service lifecycle automation. Since that could transform costs without fork-lifting, and since OPEN-O is also aimed at cloud orchestration and could then transform the revenue side, it’s a nice positioning.
To get to our final story, Vodafone says that it has aggressive plans to virtualize its networks but that vendors overall need to step up their development of NFV. This isn’t the first time that operators have said that, and I’ve certainly said that NFV vendors have generally been dawdling, but I think that there’s a dangerous risk here of mistaking motion for progress.
Vodafone, like most operators, has been vague about just what functions it’s targeting, so the notion that they’d like to have 60% of them virtualized by 2020 lacks as much specificity as the vendor strategies to help achieve that goal. There are a lot of detailed issues about NFV support, integration, the pricing of VNFs, and so forth. There’s also a bigger issue, which is whether any of that would matter even if it were resolved. We still lack any firm and sensible framework for service lifecycle automation, and absent that we have no way of validating even a single dollar’s worth of savings.
So, let’s circle back to that point of software and hardware. Every vendor has software, even hardware vendors, and obviously network operators aren’t asking vendors to drop hardware for software, or the other way around. I think what they’re asking is for a vision to deploy to. How do virtualized things, meaning hosted features/functions, play in the network of the future? They won’t do everything; anyone who thinks that general-purpose technology will push photons in transport applications is dreaming.
Another Light Reading story, I think, offers further clarity. Vodafone, here, is saying that you’d need features developed for the cloud, from the ground up, to fulfill the promise of virtualization. I agree with this too; I think it’s another way of saying that virtual network functions (VNFs) have to be built to a specific cloud-middleware or platform-as-a-service API set, which I’ve called “NFVPaaS”. NFVPaaS would be an element in a vision of a software architecture for the network of the future.
We need a strong focus on service and network management lifecycle automation, right now, to address profit compression. We need a vision of functions virtualization that can step off from that first step and define what SDN and NFV and the cloud combine to create. Without it, operators are forced to invest in technology today without knowing whether the initiatives they’re supporting as they make their purchases will obsolete what they’re trying to buy. That’s certainly something to complain about.