This year’s 4th Annual Network Virtualization & SDN Europe event proved to the 
Communication Service Provider (CSP) industry that NFV is for real, is in production and is here to stay. NFV will lead the evolution of a next-generation virtualized Telco ecosystem. I had the honour of representing VMware was truly honoured when VMware was recognized with the NFV Innovation of the Year Award for 2016, which I proudly accepted on behalf of the team.
The NFV Innovation of the Year award recognizes the company that the judges felt had demonstrated the most significant impact in facilitating the development of the NFV market over the last year, through devising an innovative NFV Proof of Concept or introducing a new service which will help to revolutionise the market, removing barriers and helping to make technology virtualization a reality. VMware vCloud NFV was selected on the basis of the platform’s capabilities for helping customers and the overall NFV market development.
The vCloud NFV Platform combines production-proven NFVI solutions with VMware and OpenStack-based VIM orchestration and powerful Day 2 operations capabilities that serves as an intelligent service delivery platform for telecommunication, IT and cloud services. As such it is a common platform that enables operators to maximize the efficiencies of a cloud-based operating model across all aspects of their business. This is only achievable due to the advanced resource management (separation) and resource scheduling (dynamic workload management) capabilities within the product suit. These capabilities persist as policy-based automated processes at time of provisioning, moves, adds and changes. It is largely this operating capability that enables customers to advance beyond proof of concept to live service.
There are now in excess of 45 live NFV deployments globally running on VMware virtualized infrastructure and delivering a wide spectrum of mobile and fixed line services. The first vCloud NFV-based deployment was announced with Vodafone Germany whose VoLTE service went live in February 2014. Since then customers who have been publically announced include Ooredoo (vIMS), Internet Initiative Japan (vCPE) and SmartSky (vEPC for in -flight services).
VMware, as the leader of virtualization, sees NFV as a right next step that every CSP should embrace to grow and thrive in the rapidly changing world of cloud and DevOps. This ecosystem is just starting to take off and VMware will play a very critical role in shaping this ecosystem for success.
Rajan
