NFV World Congress – Momentum Building

There was a palpable sense of anticipation amongst the participants at last week’s inaugural NFV World Congress in San Jose.  After so many announcements and proof of concept demos, the fruits of the collective work of this growing industry are now starting to appear.

The show kicked off with an ‘OPNFV mini-summit,’ providing attendees with a sneak peek at the project’s pending first delivery – The ‘Arno’ release of OPNFV, due for delivery later this spring.  While there is some concern with project’s delays, the audience is clearly eager to ‘kick the tires’ and evaluate this open NFV foundation against some of the commercial offerings.

Wind River’s own NFV contributions were well represented at the show, directly through live demos of our Titanium Server NFV software platform [link] and indirectly though HP’s newly announced NFV System, which builds on Wind River Carrier Grade content.  I truly enjoy showing off our product, and seeing the reaction of visitors to our booth, especially when they learn that Titanium Server is already available for immediate delivery. Demos aside, Wind River’s Charlie Ashton delivered a great keynote address entitled ‘Taking your NFVi strategy from concept to deployment,’ and participated in a lively panel discussion on ‘Reliability in an NFV World.’  All in all, a busy show for the Wind River team and a great opportunity to showcase our products and hard won experience in this space.

In addition to representation by commercial suppliers and open source projects, numerous Tier-1 operators were also in attendance.  Some provided their perspective on the industry and its evolution, while others shared details on their NFV experiences.  Verizon, for example, described how they were able to define and rollout a new ‘WiFi for Business’ offering in 90 days from project start to delivery.  That is an outstanding proof point on the one of the key goals for NFV, service agility.

I look forward to learning and hearing more success stories on the rollout of NFV at next month’s Big Telecom Event in Chicago.  I hope to see you there!