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A FierceTelecom eBrief HOW SERVICES VIRTUALIZATION IS EATING THE WORLD June 2017 6 focus is on shortening the time to market, gaining more flexibility and providing value in a world otherwise dominated by internet companies." While Garcia-Norro comments that the cloud vision promises not only improved time to market but also opportunities for new revenues. "Virtualization is getting relevant to the customer premises and enterprise market, with services like vCPE that can boost the enterprise offering and the consumer market, or SD-WAN covering a similar use case for a different segment in medium to large enterprises. "NFV will also be a catalyst for being able to deliver existing services in a significantly more cost effective way, taking the delivery times from approx 24 days down to minutes, enabling these offerings to be taken at new price points to customers that are currently underserved," explains Garcia-Norro. "e ultimate goal is to allow the carriers to monetize their cloud through their ability to address the IoT market, so they could share their capabilities with third parties so they (the third parties) can build purposed based applications with strong requirements on low latencies." POSITIONING FOR THE IOT AND 5G DeCapite adds: "SDN and NFV architectures are critical to supporting the growing variety of next generation 5G and IoT services. Each connected service will generate a unique service flow, with unique network traffic characteristics and cloud processing requirements. A service flow for a connected refrigerator service would be very different compared to an augmented reality service, or a connected car service. SDN controllers can dynamically configure intelligent switches like Radisys FlowEngine to perform real-time classification of this growing variety of service flows, and then load balance each unique service flow to its required sequence of application processing delivered by the virtualized network functions in the NFV systems." On how these services are best positioning service providers to take advantage of the IoT and, eventually, 5G, Kindt comments that the first benefit comes from the experience in solving SDN and NFV's initial challenges across network, operations, security, and processes. "Basically, it is the learning from deploying new technology with carrier-grade reliability." "Next comes digitalizing operations, which enables the service provider to gain radical operational expense benefits, and enables them to utilize DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery for improved competitive offerings in the IoT and 5G space," he says. "The pace has certainly picked up and we are in a highly innovative arena; the convergence within NFV is happening. The reason is clear; we need to be aligned in the industry in order to provide equal APIs to support a multivendor environment." Javier Garcia-Norro, SDN strategic portfolio manager, NFV infrastructure at Ericsson

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