In 2015, 39 million adults (78%) in Great Britain accessed the Internet every day, 23 million more than in 2006. The network underpinning this demand needs to become intelligent, programmable and automated to provide the connectivity demanded by the UK’s cyber-aware citizens.
According to Paul Gainham of Juniper Networks, technologies such as NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) and SDN (Software Defined Networking) have a crucial role to play in making this happen. IDC predicted that the SDN market is set to grow to more than £5.2 billion by 2018, globally.
I predict we’ll see the following developments with service providers in 2016:
Service providers feel more pressure from Web 2.0 companies
Google, Facebook and AWS are all starting to expand into the traditional service provider space, causing industry pundits to believe more innovative thinking, creative business models and new services could be on the way via either proprietary network infrastructure or in the form of OTT riding atop the SP network.
Either way, companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast will need to determine in 2016 what “competition” really looks like and start using virtualisation technology combined with their network infrastructure to their advantage to change consumer perception about how they innovate to deliver business outcomes.
NFV use cases expand significantly
While 2015 saw vendors offering new NFV solutions and customers starting to pay closer attention, in 2016 we will start seeing more concrete use cases of the technology deployed in the field to deliver new services in record time and realise operational efficiencies. This will not only yield greater business agility, but will force the current I.T. workforce to evaluate and bolster their skillset to effectively manage resources in this new reality.
Organisations will change their structural models to utilise agile development processes in this software-defined world and a migration from net/ops to dev/ops.
Virtualisation gives telcos/MSOs new business horizons – and new data challenges
Software and virtualisation technologies will enable service providers expand surgically into new markets that they previously deemed unprofitable. As such, we will see a 10x increase in regions served around the world – and subsequently, a parallel increase in the number of connected devices and humans. Because of this, service providers will need to devise new ways of managing data throughput more efficiently, given the new demands being placed on the network from all facets of the globe.
Revenue diversification takes hold
2016 will be the year of NFV, no doubt. Part of this means service providers can look to diversify their revenue streams via new services delivered from their cloud and partner clouds, through experimentation in new services delivered to market that leverage NFV, which were previously not feasible with a rigid hardware-only based model, and with more efficient resource management.
In 2016, we’ll start to see early trials of this take shape, such as the notion of sponsored data and new workloads as business partners with enterprises to solve a greater scope of problems – for example in IoT, moving up the services stack.
The author of this blog is Paul Gainham, senior director, Vertical Marketing Telecom, Cable and Cloud Vertical at Juniper Networks.
About the author:
Paul Gainham joined Juniper Networks in 2003 as Product marketing manager for Juniper Networks EMEA. In his current role Paul’s responsibilities centre around defining and executing the key marketing strategies by network domain across its Enterprise and Service Provider customer base.
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