There’s no doubt that virtualisation is critical to the future of communications service providers, but what’s much less clear is how much action CSPs have actually taken to transform their networks and services to enable the new virtualised economy.
A new initiative launched by Light Reading and its research arm, Heavy Reading, is aimed at providing CSPs a series of independent benchmarks against which they can measure their own progress regarding virtualisation.
The Future of Virtualisation Indexes are based on input from more than three dozen CSPs worldwide and are focused on three core areas of the transition to virtualised networks and services:
- Planning
- Deployment
- Spending
Each core area includes six separate benchmark components. Each component provides CSPs with a single, integrated view of where the world’s leading CSPs are in the virtualisation process, and the progress they are making — or not making — in moving to the virtualisation model.
The first set of indexes have been released this month by Light Reading and can be viewed on Virtuapedia (www.virtuapedia.com), a new website that offers a full range of resources and databases covering the people, companies, and products that are driving the CSP virtualisation movement. The indexes will be updated on a regular basis, providing an industry-wide composite scorecard for tracking the transition to virtualised networks and services.
Among the key findings from the initial Future of Virtualisation index project are the following
- An overwhelming majority of CSPs (94%) participating in the index project have started to identify the functions that they plan to virtualise by 2020, and about half of them say they have identified most or all of those functions (see Figure 1).
- The three most important virtualisation areas identified by participating CSPs are virtual network functions (75% of CSPs put VNFs on their 2017 priority list), NFV/cloud services (63.5%), and networking functions & solutions (61.5%) (see Figure 2).
- Virtualisation programs are expected to take many years for full implementation. As shown in Figure 3, only a small handful respondents expect to have their entire virtualisation program complete by the end of 2018. Only about 30% of CSPs expect to complete their entire virtualisation transformation by the end of 2020. Nearly 40% think work will be finished in 2023 or later.
Full results of the first Future of Virtualisation indexes are available at http://www.virtuapedia.com/indexes.asp
