According to research commissioned by F5 Networks, network functions virtualization (NFV) is growing rapidly in popularity. This is partly due to the possibilities that arise with the arrival of 5G. 80 per cent of industry specialists say that they consider NFV important or crucial and that they include it in their strategic focus for the next five years.
According to Bart Salaets, EMA Solution Architect Director at F5 Networks, NFV is increasingly being added by service providers. This will lead to the development of new services and business models that aim at “service agility, more innovation through automation and cost savings”, says Salaets.
The research shows that industry specialists mainly see the network and service flexibility as an advantage. 48 percent said so in the investigation. In addition, the use of automation for greater efficiency in business processes (44 percent), the reduction of OPEX (40 percent), the reduction of CAPEX (36 percent) and better network performance and reliability (35 percent) are benefits.
The fact that NFV is becoming increasingly popular is due to various challenges. These include time-to-market (48 percent), better user experiences (46 percent) and more efficient operations (45 percent). The growing importance of this issue is also reflected in the (planned) investments by industry specialists. 95 percent of the respondents said that investments in technology will increase or remain the same this year.
Challenges
However, there are still a number of challenges when it comes to NFV. For example, more than 60 percent of respondents said they were not yet entirely sure of the best purchasing method for NFV applications. In addition, a third party felt that savings should be made on the costs of purchasing methods by looking at automated systems.
There are also slightly fewer companies than last year that indicate that they are fully convinced that they have done a good implementation of NFV. Only 8 percent said that NFV was easy to implement on schedule, 22 percent experienced more difficulties than expected. 48 percent said the difficulty level was as expected.
The respondents indicated that the biggest challenges were the high costs and complexity of the implementation (36 percent), followed by the few clear business cases available (32 percent).
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.