SDN/NFV Proving its Worth to Service Providers
Business focus, hybrid approaches and ready partner ecosystems are keys to success.
Early results are showing that investments in SDN/NFV are paying off for service providers. With examples of service providers reducing virtual network function onboarding times by 70 percent, cutting time-to-revenue down by six months and delivering new services in two to four weeks, the industry has reasons for optimism.
The key to achieving success with SDN/NFV, as Netcracker's Vice President of Strategy Ari Banerjee explained in his keynote address at OSS in the Era of SDN & NFV, is a focus on business. Service providers that adopt a services-based approach and maintain their focus on business goals are the ones winning in the virtualization space. During his keynote, Banerjee discussed how these service providers are able to automate more of their internal processes and bring services to market faster. In many cases, he says, these service providers are also starting to see benefits from transitioning to a DevOps model as they implement new back-office strategies.
Netcracker was awarded the 2017 Global Telecoms Award for OSS Innovation for its Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) solution. This solution simplifies a service providers' transition from physical to virtualized networks and, in turn, accelerates new service introduction, even in hybrid and multivendor network environments. By putting both operational and control elements that cross physical and virtual domains into a single platform, service providers are able to accelerate how they design, create, launch and manage new services across hybrid domains.
Netcracker was also recognized at SDN NFV World Congress 2017 for the Best Ecosystem Program and Best NaaS Platform awards. These two recognitions go hand in hand because a critical part of making any Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) or digital marketplace initiative successful is fueling its offerings with a healthy partner ecosystem that creates and augments its services continuously over time. Having a supply of commercialized services within an operational structure, and with ready and tested customer experience components at hand, service providers have been able to achieve the kind of radical improvements in critical business metrics that Banerjee described, such as significantly faster time-to-market.
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