News
The clouds are rolling in, as the virtualisation trend starts to take hold and the U.K. gets to grips with summer.
You don’t need a calendar to tell you that the weekend is fast approaching, if you’re in the U.K. in summer, that is.
Simply wait until you catch yourself thinking "hmmm, the air’s not quite as warm as it was yesterday," and voilà, that usually indicates that it’s Friday afternoon and it’s time to start rethinking plans for a Saturday barbecue, if those dark clouds are anything to go by.
Similarly, from a telecoms perspective the arrival of summer is usually heralded by a few days of sitting down at your computer in the morning and realising that there’s not a lot going on in the wider industry, but you’re being bombarded by emails advertising events due to take place in September and October.
From a news perspective, the telecoms industry hasn’t exactly set the world alight this week, with many operators and vendors focusing primarily on the publication of their quarterly figures. We’ve had results announcements from AT&T, Vodafone, Telia, Telenor and Ericsson this week, to name a few, with many more to come over the next few weeks.
However, there have been some interesting developments in the sector in recent days, one of which being the indication that the trend towards virtualisation is gathering pace.
According to Ciena, demand for virtualised applications, services and virtual network functions among U.K. businesses can now be considered mainstream. A survey conducted on behalf of the kit maker by Opinion Matters showed that 61% of U.K. enterprises are already investing in some form of virtualised application, or are planning to do so in the next 12 months.
41% of respondents in the survey of 252 IT professionals in the U.K. described speed of deployment for new services as "very important", while 49% "highlighted the importance of virtualised applications to support rapid expansion of company IT infrastructure to new business units, partners and branches," Ciena said.
The results of the study mirror comments made across the pond this week, where both AT&T and Verzion announced the launch of new NFV capabilities.
AT&T on Monday unveiled Network Functions on Demand, the third service it has rolled out on its SDN-based Network on Demand platform.
The new service enables businesses to buy a single piece of hardware – it runs on an AT&T-branded x86 hardware platform – then add virtualised functions on top in different locations and different countries. It is available in 76 countries across the world. At launch, businesses can choose from four virtualised functions: Juniper Networks virtual routing, Cicso’s virtual router, virtual security from Fortinet and Riverbed’s virtual WAN optimisation.
The U.S. telco followed the launch with the announcement of a collaboration agreement with Orange that will see the pair work together on the standardisation of SDN and NFV technologies.
Verizon made a similar new service offering announcement of its own, taking the wraps off Virtual Network Services, which are available with three deployment options: on-premise, cloud-based and a hybrid of the two. Unlike AT&T, Verizon is using Cisco and Juniper Networks for the universal CPE hardware.
Initially, its Virtual Network Services packages cover security, WAN optimisation, and SD-WAN. Its vendor partners are Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Riverbed, and Viptela.
Virtual network functions will account for 73% of the value of the global NFV market by 2020, which by then will be worth US$15 billion (€13.6 billion), according to new forecasts released by IHS Markit this week.
That represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42% from $2.7 billion in 2015, the research firm said.
"We expect strong growth in NFV markets in 2020 and beyond, driven by service providers’ desire for service agility and operational efficiency," said Michael Howard, senior research director, carrier networks, at IHS Markit, in a particularly well-timed research note on Tuesday.
Speaking of timing, if the Met Office’s forecast is anything to go by, we only have a few hours of sunshine left before the clouds roll in, in my part of the country at least. So perhaps it’s time to sign off for the week and head outside.
