Service providers in the telecom industry are constantly seeking new, more advanced ways to deliver content and technology to their clients. According to SDN Central, this sector trend is what spurred the creation and adoption of network function virtualization within the sector.
At the time, vendors were exploring different options that would allow them to expedite the process of implementing new network services that would support increasing profits and expansion initiatives. These companies experienced the obstacles of hardware-based systems and wanted to deploy standard IT virtualization to their networks.
Thus, several vendors came together to form the ETSI Industry Specification Group for NFV, which spawned many of today's NFV technologies. Currently, the organization, which includes such giants as Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Samsung, Sprint and Verizon, is working to draft specification standards for NFV technologies.
In the meantime, a number of telcos have deployed NFV within their technological assets. Such systems provide a range of benefits for groups in the telecom industry. To highlight a few, here are some top advantages these companies experience:
Accelerated time-to-market
A main reason vendors came together to establish NFV technologies was to accelerate the time it took to introduce new networking capabilities for customers. Today, many telecoms experience just that with their NFV arrangements, and can quickly provide options for clients seeking solutions for shifting business demands and the ability to take advantage of new market opportunities while enhancing ROI.
Cost savings
Additionally, many organizations find NFV attractive due to the technology's ability to reduce operating and capital expenditures. An Intel white paper noted that NFV lowers a company's reliance on proprietary hardware and enables virtualized network functionality on standard, high volume devices. In this way, initial purchases for the system are reduced, as well as overall operating costs.
Furthermore, an f5 white paper pointed out that NFV also allows for enhanced automation and orchestration among service offerings and a range of network components.
"From a single set of management components, administrators can coordinate resource availability and automate the procedures necessary to make services available, reducing the need for human operators to manage the process and reducing the potential for error," f5 stated.
Boost revenues and customer satisfaction
Intel also noted that through improved service availability, as well as the ability to quickly deploy new solutions, telcos also see increased revenues from NFV. However, this point also goes for customer services. Today's telecom clients, whether they be individual consumers or enterprise users, require constant and reliable access to their services and providing this will improve their satisfaction overall.
