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RADCOM Winning Big Deals in the NFV/SDN Market

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RADCOM made waves when it won the AT&T deal for its MaveriQ NFV network probing solutions to support AT&T Integrated Cloud in August 2016. Now the company appears to be making further inroads to global CSPs where incumbents Netscout and others have been installed for decades.

The big driver for AT&T was cost reduction and increased network visibility. As traffic increases and new services come online, probes are still required to gain granular input into control plane and data traffic. The on-demand probing of MaveriQ allows tap points to move as fast as the workloads move. With the help of AT&T as a reference account other CSPs are taking note and willing to take a risk on the newcomer.

RADCOM largest customer is AT&T but it announced wins with Globe Telecom, Telefonica, Singtel, KPN, Vivo, BT, Orange, and TIM. All top tier logos and all at the expense of incumbent probe suppliers.

RADCOM is publicly traded but its stock has moved sideways since October 2016. (figure 1) Revenue grew 26% last year to get it to USD 37 Million.

Appledore Research estimates that the vprobe market is USD 100 Million in 2017 but will grow at double digit rates over the next 5 years. The global market for active and passive probing solutions is USD 1.8 Billion in the telecommunication market alone. This gives RADCOM a good ramp-up as CSPs increase investments in vEPC, vCPE, SD-WAN, and vfirewall deployments.

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NFV Plugtest a good first step but are we building another silo?

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ETSI held the second NFV Plugtests in Sophia Antipolis January 2018. This is a good first step to help CSPs get more comfortable in deploying virtualization in their existing networks. The market adoption for NFV and SDN has been muted at best but we are beginning to see positive signs of something more than a virtualized entity in the network. However, I wonder are we building another silo? The NFV Plugtests ignores real world deployments where systems and the legacy network elements that will exist for many more years is excluded in the test methodology. Interoperability is mostly focused on the VNFs, MANO systems (Orchestrators), and the NFV platforms.

Do we really think any CSP is going to build a greenfield virtualized network and deploy completely new software stacks that don’t interoperate with the billions invested in legacy OSS/BSS? It reminds me of the post 1996 Telecom Act which resulted in a flood of VC funding leading to the creation of brand new CLECs and the emergence of backbone fiber optic carriers. Some of this was truly greenfield for both infrastructure and software suppliers. However, for the incumbents that still had billions invested in their management and operations stack the suppliers still had to get certified via the dreaded OSMINE process.

What ETSI needs to be thinking about is how to move future plugtests beyond the 3 principle areas of NFV platforms, MANO, and VNFs. ETSI needs to consider the legacy system environment which it ignored in the ETSI NFV MANO architecture. Legacy systems are not going away in the next 3 years much less the next decade.

  • Patrick Kelly

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Cloud Native Orchestration: Signs of Progress from MWC

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At this year’s MWC, for the first time, I began seeing tangible examples of properly designed NFV orchestration. They were tangible in the sense that real NFV suppliers were solving real customer (CSP) needs. They were further tangible in that the hand-waiving component was significantly reduced.  They were “properly designed” in the sense that they met most of Appledore Research’s best practices for orchestration and automation available here.

Appledore Research have been advocating for higher levels of automation, especially proper closed-loop NF and Service lifecycle automation, for almost two years now.  The economics, as documented in our 2016 research are clear:  automation is not only essential for close reduction, it is also essential to achieve an improved customer experience, and to meet the practical realities of maintaining a dynamic, cloud-based network. Humans are simply too few and too slow.  This is a business imperative first, a technical one second.

Let’s begin with one of the most fundamental issues, and why.  NFV and service orchestration cannot be “TOSCA loaded workflows”.   Many orchestration products essentially put NFV models in from of existing fulfillment workflow engines. Furthermore, many defined specific VNF configurations – in some cases explicit images,  rather than a true map of independently managed services.  Both of these are poor design practices with huge costs agility and capability repercussions.  Most importantly they make it vastly more complicated and maintenance intensive to operate an auto-correcting control loop.  For those who want to learn more, Appledore Research plans to publish a major report on intent based modeling and automation later this year.

At MWC this year I put very specific questions to many MANO and VNF suppliers and got consistently encouraging answers.  Among the most interesting discussions as with Nati Shalom of Cloudify, a product that has always supported cloud-native principles, and appears to be gaining momentum as one of the “go to” solutions for independent NFV vendors and especially for those that also need a simple way to integrate smoothly to ONAP (a topic that deserves its own blog or two — watch this space).  At this year’s MWC Cloudify showed partnerships with Metaswitch, Fortinet, Affirmed Networks, OSOCs, VMware, 6Wind and Versa among others.  Cloudify’s philosophy is very consistent with true cloud-native operations: the VNF supplier must define a decomposed architecture, and the operations to instantiate, grow, heal and configure this VNF — and in many cases to deliver that capability in the form of an “embedded” VNF-M that can execute that logic.  This approach also takes the burden off the 600+ global SPs from having to perform this learning and engineering 600 times over – probably at a lower overall level of sophistication.  The efforts of the supplier are shared across all – lowering up-front effort, increasing re-use, and reducing ongoing integration and testing efforts (its all in the package).

I am looking forward to upcoming similar discussions with HPE, Ribbon and NOKIA, all of whom claim to have true, parametric, intent-based, model-native orchestration.  Watch for upcoming blogs and for profiles on their efforts, as well as synopses in our living MANO Supplier Roundup framework report, first published last month, and regularly updated to reflect this dynamic market.

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Appledore Research publishes “Best Practices in Orchestration; Focus on Policy, Models, and On-boarding”

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This major report builds on the foundation laid by our “Orchestration for Automation: 2018 Supplier Assessment”, and expands on the specific orchestration related methods that represent, in our opinion, Best Practices and worthy goals for any service provider (SP) or supplier to target.  These Best Practices focus on how to best achieve high degrees of closed-loop automation elegantly and simply.
The focus of this report is on modeling and on-boarding. It emphasizes the need for model native orchestration, intent based models, and for models and on-boarding processes that foster highly efficient and replicable DevOps.
Our  thesis is that traditional methods of orchestration based on pre-defined workflows have very significant disadvantages in a cloud environment and, if continued, will result in more labor, higher costs, less agility and more complexity.  Rather, we look at how to harness what has been learned in cloud native deployments and from control theory to simplify operations.  We need to think differently about everything from what is possible, to what simplicity looks like.
Orchestration is an ill-defined, and in some ways, misunderstood process.  Appledore Research believe that orchestration must at once become a common process for fulfillment, assurance and capacity management, and at the same time become distributed across layers and autonomous technology, regional or administrative domains.
Probably the foremost goal of new orchestration technology should be automation along several fronts – automated instantiation, scaling, healing and capacity optimization of both NFs and services.  Automation is essential to a range new business models, agility, cost reduction and improved users’ quality of experience.
This framework report digs into the “why?” and the “what?” of best practices that enable automation, simplify maintenance, support lean DevOps and ultimately move the industry’s business model forward dramatically, rather than merely implement new technology with operational limitations.  It specifically provides a guide to orchestration that is model-driven, policy-driven, and to the needs and components of on-boarding and modeling.
This report should be a “must read” not just for technologists, but also for operations managers and enterprise (CSP) managers that want to de-mystify the benefits of otherwise obscure technology, and have  a guide to help them implement a successful, agile, competitive future.

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Will MEF LSO’s pragmatic scope be more likely to deliver benefit than OSM’s wider and visionary scope?

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One of the interesting contrasts at the recent Layer123 Zero Touch Automation conference in Madrid was the juxtaposition of the work being undertaken by the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) project and the MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) project; presented on the preliminary day of the conference.

With its Madrid location OSM, and its key sponsor Telefonica, were bound to feature heavily. OSM is now 2 years old, has over 90 members and is approaching its 4th release of code. Throughout the morning there were many presentations on what OSM could achieve and on various proof of concepts that it was being used in. For me, what was missing was any real use of OSM in actual products within Telcos or externally with others. The Proof of Concepts still felt like early stage internal, engineering views of what an NFV product should be, rather than something a customer would buy and use.

“We will require 3 times as many software developers in the future from what we have today.” – Telefonica

I’m sure the intention of this quote, given at the conference, was to highlight how Telefonica was transforming into a  software-oriented organisation. However, it also felt like an indication of how software projects, like OSM, may be becoming too large and complex. Rather than a statement of strength it felt like an admission that trying to solve problems like generic orchestration, with no immediate product drivers, had lead to projects that had too wide a scope and limited prioritisation driven by actual external need.

The MEF LSO project , by contrast, seemed to be rapidly moving to a point where it would be successfully used to support inter-carrier ordering of live products between Telcos. Verizon and Colt had already demonstrated two way ordering between them for carrier ethernet products. Importantly this was not on a test network but on the real live network of each carrier and based on real products that those Telcos sell. It was clear that the MEF inter-carrier project would be being used in live products by the end of the year.

The scope of what MEF is attempting is less than OSM. However,  by solving a real and immediate problem, with a tighter scope, for known and current Telco products, it appears to be far more likely to succeed and be used. Most importantly by being used it will be exercised and the prioritised needs for additional functionality will be rapidly determined and delivered.

One of the challenges with initiatives like OSM, is that it can be seen as solving problems that Telcos aspire to have, rather than real problems they actually have today. OSM and other MANO initiatives are based on the idea that a Telco wants and needs to rapidly innovate services with new VNFs being constantly onboarded. The reality is that after nearly 10 years of NFV Telcos are still creating products that are largely evolutions of their existing portfolio with VNFs as static replacements of physical network functions.

The power of rapid and live use of software in real products can be seen with Amazon Snowball Edge (a ruggedized edge compute node) product. This has been rapidly released with a developer API and then evolved with application developers and external customers. In the same time that OSM has been being developed, Amazon have deployed and iteratively developed a consumer configurable, API driven, edge compute “CPE like” product.

Appledore will be publishing a research paper on the competitive open source Telco orchestration project ONAP in the near future.

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Appledore Research releases major research: cloud native industry survey and commentary

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Appledore Research has released a major survey and market analysis covering the state of virtualization in telecom.  This report consolidates input from major service providers, NEPs/Suppliers, disruptive suppliers, and major “WebScale” players to distill objectives and best practices in our collective journey to cloud-native networks and operations.

Our findings illuminate the substantial gap between objectives and reality.  As part of this report we go back to first principles – both basic network / SP economics, the original NFV white paper/charter, and service providers’ own business goals.  Not only are we not there yet, but we can see actions and tactical objectives that conflict with our industry’s ultimate success.

This document provides a set of best practices, learnings from the WebScale players, and a set of industry recommendations to help us all define and focus on success.  We emphasize and clarify the difference between merely “virtualizing” (which is insufficient and merely adds complexity and potentially cost), as compared to “cloud native” implementations.  Cloud Native operations are a business necessity since they deliver far greater agility, lower cost, higher levels of automation, and — maybe surprisingly — lower complexity and therefore risk.

This report is essential reading for a wide range of industry professionals including service providers, software suppliers, from technical professionals to those tasked with financial success and efficient operation of the business.  Finally, Appledore Research plans to follow up with insights on essential components of cloud native, including DevOps, “intent” and other important but often ill-understood topics.

The full document is available here:

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Jump in and innovate with customers

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The highlight of the DTW 2018 event in Nice was the Bladerunner catalyst. This was notable in being a non Telco centric, dynamic and transient service. Most NFV products or proof of concepts still major on what are effectively variants of existing WAN or CPE products. The catalyst was about enabling a heavy machinary provider (Caterpillar) to set up an augmented reality diagnosis of a mining machine between an engineer in a remote UAE quarry and a product SME in a UK engineering centre. The catalyst demonstrated the inter-carrier orchestration of remote network functions in the UAE and their associated service assurance functions.

No customer and nowhere to go

A catalyst is not a working product (having often been lashed together rapidly with cludges) however it was demonstrating a real world solution to a real world problem.  The challenge was the catalyst lacked the two crucial ingredients for a true digital transformation: Caterpillar, the customer, was not involved in the work and there was no obvious champion who could drive this forward into a real test or deployment. The only obvious next step for this catalyst seemed to be planning for the next catalyst whilst waiting for the underpinning technologies to be Telco grade.

I couldn’t help feel that if this were a web scale player, like Amazon, this would be being rapidly rolled out, in a DevOps style, working with a lead customer like Caterpillar based on iterations of minimum viable product … and therein is the problem for Telcos and their suppliers in gaining traction in adjacent industrial markets.

Telstra taking a different approach

Fortunately it would seem some Telcos are changing their approach. This week I have been at the Telstra international analyst day. Here they described an almost identical scenario to the catalyst for inspecting airplane panels after lightning strikes. The critical difference was that the product concept had been developed in active partnership with the airline Qantas, using an iterative approach to development, that majored on delivering minimum viable product. The approach even challenged Telco orthodoxy such as 5 9s availability. The product was not yet live, but it was clear that Telstra had a plan for onward development of this and understood what was important for the customer and what was not.

The Telco industry is failing to realise its “digital” value.

Achieving the theme of the DTW2018 of becoming a Digital Service Provider isn’t about technology and open APIs. It requires a radical change of behaviour within operators to innovating, trialling, collaboration and co-development with customers.

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Preparing for an Agile Future: Agility is more than technology

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Since our first coverage of the “Telco Cloud”, Appledore Research has emphasized that this is a business model and economics shift, more than a technology shift. Technology is merely the enabler. This is why one of our earliest major research documents investigated “The Economics of Virtualized Networks” and noted that without product innovation and significant operational shifts (automation, on-demand) the promise of the Telco Cloud would be largely unfulfilled.

Virtualization will demand more agility throughout the service provider business, from service creation / innovation through order management, order personalization, flexible charging and immediate provisioning.   Yet these same qualities – innovation and micro-segmentation — can be exploited today, as we build toward our necessary future infrastructure.

Appledore Research recently published a paper on this topic, sponsored by a supplier of flexible, catalog driven service-layer OSS, Sigma Systems (thank you). In writing this paper we took the opportunity to show how an investment in flexibility today can pay two significant dividends down the road:

  • First, it establishes the infrastructure needed to take advantage of Telco Cloud technology (e.g.: NFV and SDN) as they grow in importance.
  • Second, it provides a construct for an incremental, low risk path from today’s environment to a more agile and cost effective one.

Of course, “the devil is in the details”, and some of our suggested best practices are included. We encourage the industry to think not just about virtualization, but about how we transform our businesses and become more agile, more cost competitive and more able to satisfy individuals’ (and niche markets’) wants and needs. One of the most critical take-aways is that we all must focus on the concept of operations logic “re-use”, and how this embodies the principles of DevOps.  The “how” is possibly more important than the “what”.  This paper provides a good jumping off point, lays out a multi-year direction, and points interested readers (via a bibliography and footnotes) back to the foundational research that underlies many of the concepts and assertions in the paper.

Let’s think about how we make cloud technology more than a shiny technology, and how to exploit it as a driver of true, deep, lasting business transformation.

The full white paper is available, here, for free, as well as from Sigma Systems.

http://appledoreresearch.com/product/catalog-driven-devops-low-risk-path-agility-june-2018/

Grant

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Ciena crosses the Don River

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Ciena’s acquisition of DonRiver is a positive development for the telco software market. It has the potential to accelerate legacy network transformation and to enable hybrid physical/software network operational coexistence. Combining DonRiver’s OSS federation capability and Ciena’s Blue Planet orchestration promise a strong management platform for the transformation of legacy networks and the enabling of...

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CENX Brings Ericsson the Secret Sauce for Closed Loop Automation

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Ericsson’s acquisition of CENX is not simply a “business” event, it promises to move forward Ericsson’s ability to execute an effective closed loop, and therefore automated healing, scaling and capacity management. It should come as no surprise to any regular reader of Appledore Research that we see great value in automation, and believe that elegantly...

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Welcome to the new website

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Appledore Research are pleased to announce the launch of our new website and brand design. We hope you like it and look forward to your feedback. Over the last few months we have been working with our design team to make our website visually stronger, simpler to understand, simpler to navigate and to radically improve the...

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CSPs need to change existing operational and business practice to achieve the benefits of software enabled networks.

NFV Market at a Crossroad

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Patrick Kelly Layer 123 hosted their annual SDN NFV World Congress in The Hague last week. The event attendance was down from last year. We estimate that less than 1,000 stakeholders attended the event. Layer 123 event founders Robert Jones and Mark Lum sold the event organization to EuroMoney in May 2018. The event peaked...

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SDWAN market place assessment

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Appledore Research is undertaking a major market place assessment of SDWAN solutions and vendors. As part of this initiative we are pleased to announce that the first two solution profiles for Nokia Nuage and Talaria are now available for purchase. Over the rest of the year we will be publishing the first market wide assessment...

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Netcracker point the way to a Telco cloud business model

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In The Hague Netcracker announced its new Business Cloud solution, with a first announced customer Telefonica Mexico. Netcracker is supporting Telefonica Mexico in providing SDWAN solutions to its medium to large enterprise customers under the “NextWAN” product banner. Getting beyond “How many VNFs can dance on a pin?” Appledore believe this announcement is important because of...

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NOKIA’s Global Analyst Forum – Saving the World with 5G

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Here’s the skinny: 5G will enable industrial automation, propel the next stage of world economic growth and productivity, improve standards of living, make industrial environments safer, and generate piles of money for NOKIA. Economic Data Showing Significant Productivity Deviations between the “Best and the Rest” Or that was the big theme of Nokia’s 2018 Global...

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MycomOSI Sold to Inflexion

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Inflexion has made its first purchase in the software automation domain with the purchase of MycomOSI. The addition of MycomOSI does not currently complement other portfolio companies in the Inflexion portfolio. Financial consideration was not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal has estimated the deal at USD 128 Million . MycomOSI develops and sells directly Automated...

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Why NFV should Lose the N – Another Bite

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Recently I revisited a blog I wrote in 2015 (see below), prompted by Appledore’s attendance at SDN and NFV World Congress (see NFV Market at a Crossroad) Deja Vous all over again What surprised me in re-reading this was how little has changed in our industry in 3 years. 5G still seems to be primarily about...

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Value of Virtual Probes in Closed Loop Automation

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By: Patrick Kelly The network transformation from physical network functions to virtual network functions requires a fundamental design change in how application and services are tested and assured in a hybrid virtual network. Workloads will move dynamically to support cloud bursting, driving the need to scale the network in/out in dramatically shorter timeframes. Existing monitoring...

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Learning from the failure of Ericsson Revenue Manager

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Fail fast and fail often The announcement by Ericsson of the complete write down of its next generation BSS “Revenue Manager” and a refocus on its legacy BSS did not surprise us. Ericsson deserve credit for biting the bullet and effectively discontinuing “Revenue Manager”, even if it’s possibly two years late. Appledore believe that the lessons...

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