The discussion of the benefits of NFV has centered on the service providers, who would use it to drive new services that lead to new revenue and lower costs. But what about the end users who buy these new services? How will they benefit?
I suggest we start with what gets end users to look at something new. “What’s in it for me?” is the natural reaction of an end user who is presented with the prospect of a new or revised service built with a potentially risky new technology such as NFV. The benefit must be valuable enough to cause the end user to change, subscribe or try the new service and continue to pay for it once the trial period ends.
Following are my bets for the characteristics of new services that have the most end user appeal.
Try Before You Buy
One requirement that operators have for NFV is the availability of new licensing models for software VNFs, including options such as pay-as-you-go and revenue sharing. With these new pricing models the incremental cost of a new service can very low and the pre-service cost can be zero. Try before you buy is proven model for web and OTT services, with enthusiastic adoption by end users. Service providers are now empowered to offer free trial periods on services.
Elasticity
Bandwidth on demand is a popular option for users and NFV promises to extend elasticity to other types of services. For a chain store operator, it is beneficial to dynamically expand the geographic scope and scale of a VPN as new stores are added. A better example might be a virtualized and scalable Content Delivery Network (CDN) implementation for video. Being able to add storage on demand helps meet transient demands based on viewing patterns.
On-Demand
An elastic service assumes that the service exists and is in operation. What about the initial service activation? A huge advantage for customers is the ability to add services on demand using a customer portal, rather than today’s order-and-wait model. Dynamic control is how service provider Masergy positions its Virtual f(n) service. Masergy doesn’t lead with the underlying NFV and SDN technology but instead promotes how it benefits customers. Specifically, Masergy describes how a virtualized and automated platform puts the end user in control of services.
The idea of on-demand telecom services is powerful, and revolutionary. It takes telecom services from the world of order-and-wait to 24/7/365 order fulfillment.
Custom Services
Innovative businesses move faster than others and they need agile and responsive suppliers. In today’s communications-driven world they need a telco partner that can quickly build and deploy custom services that go beyond the needs of the mass market. NFV provides the components to quickly assemble and deploy innovative services. A custom service can now be offered quickly and cost effectively to smaller customers that previously had to settle for standard offerings.
Everything Being Virtualized and Moved to the Cloud. Why?
The move to the cloud is analogous to the move to virtualized services based on NFV. Initially, the cloud was viewed as new and risky, but the benefits of scalable and on-demand services soon won over the skeptics. The cloud is mainstream and is used for business-critical applications. For example, Netflix has announced that it will shut down its last dedicated data center and move all of its operations to cloud services hosted by Amazon. Netflix had said that,
“Cloud environments are ideal for horizontally scaling architectures. We don’t have to guess months ahead what our hardware, storage, and networking needs are going to be. We can programmatically access more of these resources from shared pools within AWS almost instantly.”
NFV is far more than a way for service providers to make more money or lower costs. It’s the way we are going to work together to change service delivery from telco time to internet time. We are going to move from weeks or months to seconds, and give users the scale and customization they demand. End users are going to love this.