TT Poll: Faster Provisioning of NFV Services & Applications Carry the Day

With NFV moving out of proof-of-concept trials and into real-world deployments, its biggest impact this year for service providers is "faster and cheaper provisioning of new services and applications," according to a recent Telco Transformation poll.

That answer took first place in the poll with 49% of the votes. Notching second place was "Automating systems and services with big data, SDN and AI," at 29%.

From the naysayer side, 21% said NFV's impact would be "mostly nowhere" because the technology is mostly relevant to Tier 1s. "NFV is all about reducing hardware in network infrastructure; that's it!" came in last with a paltry 4% of the votes.

During last month's NFV and Carrier SDN event in Denver, Senior Analyst Jim Hodges gave an update on NFV's status. According to Heavy Reading's NFV/SDN Tracker Survey from the second quarter of this year, 41% of the respondents replied that NFV was "very important" to their network strategies over the next two years while 31% responded that it was "essential."

By contrast, 21% of the survey respondents from the same survey in the fourth quarter of 2015 said that NFV was "essential," but almost the same number (40%) said it was "very important."

Over the same two surveys, 29% said NFV was "somewhat important" in 2015 while 20% did in the 2017 survey. In both surveys, 2% said NFV was "not important at all" while "marginal" went from 8% in 2015 down to 6% this year.

As for the biggest NFV implementation challenges, security, cloud orchestration and management and OSS integration, respectively, were the top three concerns in both surveys, although all three did go down in the percentages from 2015 to 2017.

Hodges summarized that while progress has been made in both SDN and NFV, the challenges haven't changed that much. The move to commercial 5G deployments will spur SDN and NFV's advancement.

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation