The report, ‘Reshaping the future with NFV and SDN’, was completed in conjunction with management consulting firm Arthur D. Little and analyses the value and impact of these technologies in the carrier network.
“Moving to the new ‘cloud network’ is no longer a question of ‘if’ for service providers but the real questions are ‘how and when’,” said Cassidy Shield, managing partner, Bell Labs Consulting.
“The answers and strategies can be very different, based on the technology structure and business model for each operator but there is no doubt the planning needs to start now.”
The study claims that as network ownership becomes less of a prerequisite for service delivery, virtually anyone can become a service provider.
Bearing this in mind, Alcatel-Lucent believes that traditional providers should both observe and capitalise on this new competition, and develop network functionality to enable them to tap into higher value product and service units, such as IT security and the cloud services market.
“The time is now for Europe’s telecoms industry to bring networking into the cloud era, it will not be trivial to execute programmability and automation at the scale required for success, but the prize is significant,” said Jesús Portal, Partner at Arthur D. Little.