IG1121 NFV Readiness: VNF Procurement and Lifecycle Management R14.5.1

The movement in the IT and communications industries towards virtualization has been gathering pace. Virtualization promises enhances flexibility, scalability, reduce cycle-time to market and opens up many new business and service opportunities for service provider and solution vendors alike.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has the potential to disrupt traditional network equipment / appliance based supply chains, and creates the opportunity for innovation in the supply chain, support, and operations.

Service providers have well-honed approaches to procuring and operating the full equipment lifecycle of Network Equipment and Appliances. To exploit the agile and efficiency saving inherent in NFV, operators and service providers need to review their current processes for procurement, operations and equipment lifecycle management; and to establish where they need to be adapted and enhanced to meet the needs of hybrids of existing and virtualized networking.

This briefing reviews step by step the full Network Service NFV lifecycle and identifies areas where procurement and operations practice may need to change in order to exploit the potential for NFV agility and lowered operations costs.

This briefing addresses questions such as: 

• Why will virtualization impact NFV procurement?
• How will operational processes be evolved to support virtualized functions?
• Why is the concept of “Network Function Sourcing Lifecycle needed to manage virtualization?
• Why procurement executives working with operations executives are the key to supporting change/ transformation?
• How TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and TOILS (Total Operational Impact from Lifecycle of Services) will be affected? 

Whilst change in Procurement and operations is inevitable this briefing shows that the changes are tractable for those service provider that rise to the challenge – be prepared – or what we term NFV Readiness.