Is the T&M market mature enough to manage operators’ SDN and NFV networks?

July 17, 2017

Está el mercado de T&M maduro para gestionar las redes SDN y NFV de los operadores? 

Written by Rafael A. Junquera, Editorial Director, Telesemana.com  

See the full article (in Spanish) on Telesemana.com.  

English response from RADCOM’s David Korman, Product Manager

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-defined networking are transforming network management and service deployment. For test and measurement solutions to fit into this dynamic, software-controlled network, and help CSPs enjoy the full benefits of network agility and automation they need to go through the same transformation:

  • By virtualizing their solution – designed for the virtualized environment a cloud-native solution builds upon a micro-service based architecture for increased proficiency (for real-time performance, using less hardware and more efficiently), reliability (failure resilience for continuous monitoring) and elastic scalability (dynamic, automated in/out scalability)
  • By deploying DevOps design and modeling – transitioning to a software controlled network means continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) to push forward with rapid product development; making changes quickly without compromising on quality. With NFV standards and ecosystems evolving at a fast rate T&M needs to keep pace and evolve at the same speed.

For CSPs, the transition to a cloud environment has significant implications as to the culture and skill-set of the organization, as it requires employees to move away from hardware expertise to developing software expertise and building out cloud ecosystems. Moreover, this will also require a better understanding of how to consolidate all the VNF components that comprise the cloud based platform, while maintaining their health and performance.

For T&M vendors this means that CSPs are looking for cloud experts to aid them in building these ecosystems and rethinking what is possible for T&M solutions. CSPs want to create the next generation of dynamic and agile networks where T&M is part of the network infrastructure and not deployed as an afterthought. Instead of network engineers sitting and monitoring lots of screens, the T&M solution and network orchestration need to work in unison to assure customers continually receive a high quality of service automatically.

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