During last month's NFV & Carrier SDN event in Denver, Heavy Reading's Jim Hodges gave a presentation that said that NFV was at the "Hillary Step" of Mount Everest, meaning there's one more level of ascent to reach the mountain top.
The Hillary Step was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who made the first summit of Everest in 1953 with guide Tenzing Norgay. The Hillary Step was located -- Hodges mentioned that it may have collapsed earlier this year -- in the "dead zone" of Everest due to the bottleneck of traffic and the inability to survive for long periods of time at that altitude.
Hodges used the Hillary Step as an allegory for the state of NFV this year. Hodges said that NFV has made progress in its second year at the Hillary Step, including in crucial areas like orchestration, OSS/BSS intergration, security, interop testing and standards, and the adoption of open source technologies. However, he added that the question remains as to what extent carriers and network equipment providers will be able to push through the remaining challenges en route to commercialization at a massive scale.
The top implementation challenges stayed the same between Heavy Reading's NFV/SDN Tracker Survey Q4 2015 and the recent NFV/SDN Tracker Survey Q2 2017. Security ranked first in 2015 as the biggest implementation challenge at 64%, followed by cloud orchestration and management (59%) and OSS integration (49%). In this year's survey, security dropped to 54% while cloud orchestration and management and OSS integration tallied 51% and 45%, respectively.
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation