Carrier Network Virtualization Palo Alto Conference Summary

Informa hosted the Carrier Network Virtualization conference in Palo Alto December 11 – 13 2014. Approximately 300 CSPs, vendors, and investors attended the high quality event focusing on lab and early PoC deployments for NFV and SDN. A small area was set-up for exhibits. The bulk of the presentations from operators provided a glimpse on practical NFV/SDN deployments that attempted to tackle some key business problems. Brian Field from Comcast presented an interesting SDN business use case that blended both open source with commercial source code. Comcast is experimenting with the notion that one platform can be created that runs both its supplier commercial code and Comcast defined open source code. Comcast calls this “hybrid open”architecture (“HOpen”).

A strong underlying theme was present at the conference on facilitating an open collaborative community among both IT developers within CSPs and the vendors that have joined OpenDaylight and OpenNFV. Neela Jacques from OpenDaylight Project and Marc Cohn from OPNFV presented on the progress of both groups in the past year.

Presentations focused on recent NFV and SDN sandbox activity from carriers across the globe. A solid representation of leading CSPs included AT&T, Verizon, DT, SK Telecom, Orange, Comcast, PCCW, China Mobile, BT, Cox, and Telus. The maturity of NFV can best be classified as early proof of concept with most activity occurring in the labs within CSPs.

I would expect to see increased POC activity in 2015 moving from lab trials to limited deployments on a small scale. Despite leading CSPs driving standards and crystallizing their blueprints for how NFV and SDN can best be applied in their future network build-outs, the market place is still fluid and suppliers will most likely conform to their own idea of the standards in an effort to differentiate their solutions from competitors. As long as CSPs band together and participate in driving the standards, the adoption curve of NFV/SDN will accelerate bringing faster innovation in the market and significant reductions in the integration tax.

All of the major suppliers were represented including Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Amdocs, Huawei, HP, Alcatel Lucent, Netcracker, and Ciena. Smaller ISVs in the software space included Nakina, Ixia, QosMos, anuta networks, and tail-f now part of Cisco. This is a worthwhile event for vendors that want a big bang for their marketing dollar. The event was designed to expedite network opportunities and educate the audience on current CSP initiatives.