The NFV movement & the way AMDOCS embracing technological revolution

Perspective of NFV

The explosive growth of networks in recent times has led to the different dimension of thinking as to how to keep pace with changing business models and technology. Today’s networks rely on masses of single purpose proprietary network elements from load balancers, firewalls and Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), to telecom specific capabilities such as Evolved Packet Core (EPC), IP Multi-media Subsystem (IMS), and Broadband Network Gateways (BNG). Because these systems are vertically integrated, proprietary, and deployed in hardware, they are difficult to upgrade and manage. The complex back-office systems that provide service-level capabilities are custom-built, brittle, and complex. These factors make it difficult for service providers to roll out new services in a timely fashion with agility, with direct negative impact to the bottom line, hence increased CAPEX & OPEX resulting non-profitability in business.

Here arrives NFV, a widely used terms in present scenario. It not only enhances agility but saves the rising cost and helps the business move efficiently and diligently.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has in recent times drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. It had created immense excitement in MWC 2018 where telecommunication industry has unanimously felt that the time has come to move from conventional method to more innovative architecture and its faster implementation despite challenges ahead.

 Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies has early realised the potential of NFV and has partnered with world’s leading telco giant to ensure NFV moment a path forward who aims to virtualize larger part of network in coming years.

 By decoupling Network Functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in Operating Expenses (OPEX) and Capital Expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment

SDN (Software Defined Network)

The monumental growth in multimedia content, the explosion of cloud computing, the impact of increasing mobile usage, and continuing business pressures to reduce costs while revenues remain flat are all converging to wreak havoc on traditional business models.

To keep pace with the changing scenario, service providers are rushing to evolve new technology in consonance with spiralling demand, hence SDN perfectly caters their need and sets the agenda for fast pace growth of industry.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture where network control is decoupled from forwarding and is directly programmable.

Going by definition, It has two characteristics, namely decoupling of control and data planes, and programmability on the control plane.

NFV vs SDN

These two emerging technologies are closely related and yet have different objectives in functional terms. Both SDN and NFV with their respective differences are approaches towards the ultimate goal of Network Virtualization and Automation.

For NFV, it’s to reduce CAPEX and OPEX, speed up time to market, and be agile and flexible.

 For SDN, it’s to reduce CAPEX and OPEX, be agile and flexible, and enable innovation.

NFV grew out of the carriers’ needs to encompass hardware from multiple vendors that populate their customers’ networks; the solution is to virtualize network services so they can roll out new services on more general-purpose devices, rather than rolling out function-specific hardware.

SDN disaggregates the network control logic from the network equipment, to provide a service layer that is more manageable and programmable than physically reconfiguring networks. 

The goal with both SDN and NFV is to control the network logically, with software and minimize hands-on work with those network devices.

Key take away from NFV

     Some key takes away of deploying network services as virtual functions are

•        Flexibility in the allocation of network functions in general-purpose hardware;

•        Rapid implementation and deployment of new network services;

•        Support of multiple versions of service and multi-tenancy scenarios;

•        Reduction in CAPEX costs by managing energy usage efficiently;

•        Automation of the operational processes, thus improving efficiency and reducing OPEX costs.

How Amdocs embracing NFV revolution

AMDOCS (NASDAQ: DOX) has been instrumental in leading the NFV moment in the industry with the adoption of ONAP. Amdocs NFV powered by ONAP leverages open source networking technology and can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud using modern DevOps adoption techniques. With the large-scale implementation of DevOps processes in AMDOCS in recent times could be seen as seriousness and positioning of AMDOCS towards NFV movement.

AMDOCS has also collaborated with one leading telco Giant who has one of the world’s premier network virtualization initiatives. It’s designed to leverage cloud technologies to accelerate network agility, while reducing both CAPEX and OPEX. AMDOCS is Co-creator and global integrator for this initiative and has been leading it from the front.

With leading telco giants and AMDOCS coming together, they will accelerate NFV globally and push the industry’s most comprehensive NFV automation platform that will change the entire dynamics of network technology. Global service providers will also take leverage from simplifying of virtual network environments, operational and capital savings, increased innovation and improved service agility.

Amdocs NFV puts focus on hybrid network, as it has robust understanding of network and services transformation through Amdocs’ OSS/NFV portfolio. Gartner has positioned Amdocs as a Leader in its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Operations Support Systems(OSS) and this gives Amdocs a cutting edge on the world platform of network technology. AMDOCS also offers ONAP discovery kit that will help the early birds who are not interested in NFV but wants to use testing and validating virtualization process and here AMDOCS can facilitate such venture so efficiently while taking service provider to a new age solution.

Recently, AMDOCS announced its collaboration with Microsoft’s azure, which sends strong message to the industry that AMDOCS’s ONAP can work on multiple cloud and help service provider gain the time-to-market and cost benefits of public clouds. Slowly and steadily, AMDOCS NFV powered by ONAP is moving pretty strongly and boosting the confidence of NFV aspirant with its cutting-edge technology.

However, there are myriads of challenges in the way of NFV and these needs to be addressed in timely fashion so as to pave the way NFV movement. The major challenges are to bring all stakeholders in one platform to work on standardized format which Amdocs performed exceedingly well in creating number of standards to suit their requirement and create a platform to initiate dialogue. Second most specific challenge is to assure the operators that they need to come out from mindset of getting finished product and join the process to get ahead in the age of digital revolution and virtualization.