At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014, HP today introduced OpenNFV, a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) program designed to help the telecom industry accelerate innovation and launch new services faster.
HP has also dedicated Bethany Mayer, currently senior vice president and general manager, HP Networking, to assume responsibility for leading HP’s NFV strategy.
According to a recent survey by Dialogic, majority of respondents see service providers benefitting the most from NFV with Unified Communications the likely starting place for NFV deployments followed by 4G and 3G a distant consideration.
Martin Fink, executive vice president and chief technology officer, HP, said: “HP’s OpenNFV Program combines HP’s technology leadership with a strong partner ecosystem to enable our customers to leverage new market opportunities faster while managing spiralling costs.”
Ovum earlier said OTT social messaging applications cost CSPs $32.5 billion in lost SMS revenues in 2013, which is predicted to reach $54 billion by 2016. In 2018, OTT VoIP providers will have cost the global telecoms industry $63 billion in lost revenues.
HP OpenNFV Program enables telecoms to accelerate time to market and drive new revenue. Prior to adopting NFV, CSPs managed cumbersome, individual network hardware appliances. With HP OpenNFV, they can leverage commercial off-the-shelf hardware with virtualization to test and deploy new offerings in minutes rather than months, opening the door for CSPs to be the industry innovators.
HP also brings more than 30 years of telco-specific experience, along with more than 5,000 telecom professionals to this new offering, ensuring that carriers have a tried and tested partner supporting them on their NFV journey.
Peter Willis, chief data networks strategist, BT, said: “HP contributed resources, technologies and lab facilities to enable a range of proofs of concept, including: content delivery network, Wi-Fi IPsec termination, virtualized customer premises equipment and routers. The activities have been executed in an open, collaborative forum with other technology partners and have delivered valuable results to BT and the industry.”
HP NFV RA incorporates HP Virtual Services Router, which is designed to support various virtualized appliances such as multitenant hosted public clouds and virtualized branch Customer Premise Equipment deployments. HP NFV RA also incorporates SDN capabilities to complement NFV, including the HP Virtual Application Networks, SDN Controller and HP Open SDN Ecosystem.
These combined solutions offer CSPs a ready-to-be-deployed architecture that can enable the transformation from legacy networks to NFV- and SDN-enabled infrastructure. Working together, SDN and NFV can provide synergies for creating a complete ecosystem that can help CSPs become more agile, innovative and competitive.
HP plans to establish the HP OpenNFV Labs and an HP OpenNFV Partner Program, the industry’s first effort to systematically assemble a multivendor portfolio that can test, validate and manage the coexistence of network applications.
