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A FierceTelecom eBrief HOW SERVICES VIRTUALIZATION IS EATING THE WORLD June 2017 5 and each carrier has a timeline on where they want to go, but overall, NFV will be the norm in the near future," adds DeCapite. Wheelus states that AT&T deployed the first scaled, software-defined, on demand capability of its kind in the US, and that the company has since developed a platform built on SDN and NFV technologies. "With AT&T FlexWare, businesses can deploy multiple virtualized functions, like routers and firewalls, on one FlexWare device," she notes. "Without proprietary hardware, businesses can increase their network agility while driving down cost of ownership." Wheelus adds: "SDN and NFV innovation is evolving quickly through the many open communities like ONAP and OpenStack. When you have the power of thousands of scientists and developers around the world collaborating on the next breakthrough, the speed of innovation moves very fast." ings are moving fast, agrees Garcia-Norro: "e pace has certainly picked up and we are in a highly innovative arena; the convergence within NFV is happening. e reason is clear; we need to be aligned in the industry in order to provide equal APIs to support a multivendor environment. is is driven by the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV ), where we at Ericsson are very active, helping our industry move towards that common goal." UNDERSTANDING THE BENEFITS So what benefits are on this NFV forefront? Wheelus comments: "Some of the biggest benefits of SDN and NFV are not just in the development of new services, but also the deployment of those services. In the past, when a new service required a new physical network function to be developed and deployed, the roll out could take many months and years for multi-national enterprise companies with large footprints. Now with the advent of virtualized functions and services, these deployments are software being pushed out remotely to the cloud or to commodity-based servers on the customer premise in a matter of hours, rather than months or years." SDN and NFV promise operators the ability to deploy new services more quickly. From on- demand bandwidth to SD-WAN, there are various offerings that carriers are set to use to recoup their virtualization investments. Kindt says: "Initially the services are demand-driven (mobile packet core data capacity, also mobile voice capacity, VPN and VNFs such as vFW and WAN optimization services), plus capacity optimization of network applications (charging, messaging, DPI, etc). Next it is a matter of new services, such as dynamic enterprise services (includes SD-WAN), government cloud, IoT, 5G, etc." He adds: "e rapid deployment of new services relies on key enablers, particularly digitalized operations, microservices, and a shared data layer. Looking back over the past four years, we see typical NFV deployment intervals for demand-driven services shrink from two years to six months. With the broader availability of these key enablers in 2017 and 2018, we expect service providers will be able to likewise reduce the deployment time of new services." On the offerings that carriers will use to recoup their virtualization investments, Jacobfeuerborn says it will range from on demand bandwidth, SD-WAN, and virtual CPE solutions, towards core services: "e key Continued from page 3 "SDN and NFV innovation is evolving quickly through the many open communities like ONAP and OpenStack. When you have the power of thousands of scientists and developers around the world collaborating on the next breakthrough, the speed of innovation moves very fast." Amy Wheelus, AVP, technology project management, AT&T

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