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Level 3's Dugan: SDN/NFV Key to Enterprises' Digital TransformationsDENVER -- NFV & Carrier SDN -- When it comes to IT and infrastructure needs, enterprises of all sizes are facing an increasingly chaotic world, but service providers can restore order to those businesses through the use of SDN and NFV. Such was the message of Level 3 Communications' Andrew Dugan, group vice president and interim lead, global technology and IT, during his opening keynote address on Tuesday at the NFV & SDN Carrier Event in Denver. "It's really no surprise to anybody that we are going through a network transformation," Dugan said. "There's a huge trend towards digitization within our enterprise customer base. What may be surprising is how much it has really affected the way that they operate. It's transformed the businesses of our enterprise customers. Their businesses are really centered around the digital experience."
Dugan used a coffee shop as an example of how complex IT and infrastructure have gotten for businesses. "Today in order to run a coffee shop you've got to have a huge amount of network and IT infrastructure," he said. "You have to have a WiFi network for your guests to dial into. You have to have a local network within the store to connect up all your point-of-sale systems. Maybe your point-of-sale systems need access to that WiFi because your employees are mobile and need to be able to move around and ring up their services." Customers at the coffee shop could also be using mobile apps to check their credit balances or to receive rewards, such as free coffee, in real time. "The amount of infrastructure required to support that real-time communications in that coffee shop has transformed their business overnight," Dugan said. "That's not that unique in enterprise. They've really experienced an explosive growth in terms of what their IT and networking needs (are.) A lot of these companies aren't networking companies. They're not IT companies, but they're forced to build out this massive infrastructure in order to support their new digital business. They're looking at ways to make that simpler for them. They want to simplify that chaos that has been created within their environment." Service providers can help enterprises stare down those challenges through the use of technologies and services such as cloud, SDN, NFV, hybrid WAN and security, Dugan said. Dugan said that SDN started out as way for carriers to enable a certain set of services and capabilities internally. For example, Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) has been building out its own SDN infrastructure for three to three and half years and it currently has about 75,000 network elements under control of its SDN orchestration system. But the real promise of SDN and NFV is service providers turning those capabilities over to their customers. With SDN and NFV, enterprise customers can use a web portal to turn up or turn down services on demand as well as look at their network performance and utilization statistics. "SDN brought together with NFV really has the capability, in my mind, to transform the way that carriers deal with and interact with the enterprise," Dugan said. "It can really improve the efficiency. It can reduce their costs. It increases their productivity as an organization. That's a real opportunity for us. Our goal is to enable the enterprises to build their own full networking experience in real time, on demand to meet their changing needs." Dugan said that while there has been a lot of talk about SDN and NFV as technologies that are used in spot areas by service providers, there's a bigger picture to consider. "One thing we need to be careful of is to really not lose the sight of the big picture and the big picture is really enabling those enterprises to solve their complex networking needs," he said. "So how carriers use them to then transform that into a service offering is critically important, and it's really to help them to simply and sort of bring order to that chaotic environment that they've grown into over time."
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation |
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On-the-Air Thursdays Digital Audio
ARCHIVED | December 7, 2017, 12pm EST
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
Special Huawei Video
Huawei Network Transformation Seminar The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete. |
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