NEC/Netcracker Workshop Focuses on Key Market Objective: Generating Revenue From SDN/NFV
NEC/Netcracker NaaS helps service providers like Telefonica Global Solutions quickly bring new services to customers.
The time for trials and proofs of concepts (PoCs) is coming to an end as service providers transition their virtualization objectives from reducing costs to generating new revenue. That seemed to be the theme on the opening day of SDN & OpenFlow World Congress in The Hague.
The day started off with sessions, deep dives and updates from many of the key standards bodies in the virtualization space, including ETSI and the Open Networking Foundation. Besides the usual tech-focused sessions, there were also presentations on whether virtualization is living up to the hype, VNF onboarding and how software-based networks are enabling 5G and the Internet of Things.
These topics that focused on real services led nicely into NEC/Netcracker’s two-hour workshop in which speakers shed light on how service providers can progress virtualization projects and how they can make money from those investments.
Fran Heeran, Vice President and General Manager of SDN/NFV at Netcracker, confirmed that discussions with service providers have gone well beyond initial analyses of whether or not to use virtualization. By now, PoCs and trials have validated the cost savings; service providers are now asking how to commercialize their deployments in order to generate revenue.
With IT spending on the rise, now is the time to get serious about making money from those investments. This demand aligns with today’s announcement of NEC/Netcracker NaaS, a brand new offering that helps service providers roll out network, cloud, value-added and virtual services quickly to both business and residential customers. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach to monetizing virtualization endeavors. As such, NEC/Netcracker NaaS brings the unique value proposition of bundling various apps and services into configurations that are suitable for any business, from the largest enterprise to small and home offices.
One of the highlights of NEC/Netcracker's workshop was a presentation by Luisa Mola, Service Development Director of Telefónica Global Solutions, who outlined her organization’s use of NEC/Netcracker NaaS to achieve its transformation and new service delivery goals.
Besides changing the network, services and processes, Mola said her company also had to change the mindset among its people. Her overall goal was to improve delivery time and the quality of services and introduce new customer-centric services.
Mola said among her lessons learned were that the types of NaaS-based projects that her company is pursuing work best within smaller teams because things happen so quickly. And with other service providers looking for similar strategies in which flexibility, reusability and faster time-to-market are critical, expect to see more varied services coming to market that will introduce new revenue streams and help service providers move up the value chain.