Will Service Providers Hit SDN/NFV Time-to-Market Goals?
Service providers have high expectations for radically reducing the time it takes to deploy new services once SDN/NFV is deployed. How will they do it?
Service providers have high expectations for radically reducing the time it takes to deploy new services once SDN/NFV is deployed. A recent survey conducted by European Communications on behalf of Netcracker found that nearly 77 percent of service providers expect new enterprise B2B services to be launched in less than three months with SDN/NFV in place. Less than 38 percent say they can hit that mark today.
If three months isn’t fast enough, service providers’ expectations are also aggressive for much shorter launch windows. Nearly 60 percent of service providers expect to reduce time-to-market (TTM) to less than one month, and 38 percent expect to pull off launches in less than a week.
Conversely, less than one-quarter of all respondents expect new enterprise B2B services to require six months to launch once SDN/NFV is in place. More than 60 percent need at least 6 months to launch new B2B enterprise services now. The days of service launches requiring a year or more are largely expected to vanish—less than 6 percent of those surveyed expect service launches to take longer than 12 months with SDN/NFV.
It’s no surprise given the current momentum of SDN/NFV that expectations are lofty for what this new tech will deliver. After all, according to our survey, most respondents (68 percent) agree that the No. 1 benefit they’ll gain from deploying SDN/NFV is much faster time-to-market.
Realizing and achieving that expected speed has far more to do with transforming BSS and OSS than it does with deploying SDN or NFV. The vast majority of service providers in this study agree that capabilities like seamless orchestration for hybrid environments (91 percent); end-to-end service design and creation (77 percent); and automated, real-time network topology discovery and reconciliation (76 percent) are must-have next-gen OSS components for virtualized services.
Similarly, respondents agree that integrated self-care portals (83 percent), real-time transaction management (77 percent) and virtualization-ready product catalogs that bundle telecom services with VNFs and SaaS applications (73 percent) are necessary BSS components.
Expectations continue to rise for service providers, and business cases are increasingly built upon these presumptions. It is important to note that while the industry buzzes about the promise of new SDN and NFV technologies, those deploying it recognize that the real benefits, like radically accelerated time to market for new services, depend heavily on BSS and OSS capabilities designed specifically for hybrid, multivendor IT and network environments.