For CSPs it’s time to change – or be changed

Virtualisation requires a new approach – both for CSPs and for the vendors that support their transformations

Sue Spradley is vice president and general manager of the Network and Service Enablement (NSE) business at JDSU. She joined the company in January, 2013 as leader for NSE global product line management with responsibility for all NSE businesses. These encompass broadband networking, mobility, network visibility and control, and cloud and data centre offerings. Previously, Spradley was president of the North America region and executive board member of the Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) joint venture.

Prior to NSN, Spradley was a senior executive at network equipment vendor Nortel, during which she served many roles including sales, global services and operations, with responsibility for services for enterprises and carriers, as well as for supply chain and manufacturing. As president for Nortel’s global product line management and North American sales, she restored profitability to the $2 billion business unit. As vice president for customer service and operations for wireless networks, she successfully led a team providing field-based project management, engineering, design, implementation and support for North American tier one accounts. Spradley currently serves as chair for US Ignite and ATIS, and previously served on the board of directors for Exfo, and was a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee reporting to the President of the United States.

As JDSU plans to spin-off its NSE unit into a new company to better meet the needs of communications service providers as they migrate to virtualised and cloud-based technologies, she tells VanillaPlus that CSPs need to make sure they have the right test and assurance capabilities to support NFV deployments including the ability to support the NFV orchestrator in requesting good network configuration and reconfiguration.

VanillaPlus: What does JDSU view as being critical to the business success of virtualised networks and services?

Sue Spradley: While not under-estimating the challenges involved in implementing the basic virtualisation infrastructure and functions, I would highlight two key enablement activities for communications service providers (CSPs) to focus on. The first is to ensure they have the ability to provide appropriate test and assurance functions in the NFV environment. Virtualised networks will require at least the same level of testing and assurance visibility as physical networks require, if not more. CSPs will not be prepared to release NFV network capacity into commercial service without having the ability to conduct pre-release testing and monitor and troubleshoot the network when in operation. However, most of today’s test and assurance solutions are not capable of operating in a virtualised environment, so availability of test and assurance solutions that can be used within an NFV network will be a key gating factor in the commercial launch of virtualised networks and services. The good news is that the technology is now becoming available.

The second enablement activity I’d emphasise is the ability for the NFV orchestrator to request good network configuration and re-configuration decisions. It is fine to confirm that the NFV environment can effectively implement network configurations, but if the proposed decisions do not deliver either a better Quality of Experience (QoE) for subscribers, and/or lower operating costs, then the NFV network will not deliver the expected business enhancing results. So a second critical factor will be the provision of the appropriate analytics – supported by the collection of the appropriate data – to enable the orchestrator to propose ‘good’ configuration decisions.

We believe that JDSU solutions will play a key role in delivering on both the above critical factors.

VP: What role will JDSU Network & Service Enablement (NSE) solutions fulfill in a virtualised environment and how does this differ from their role in traditional physical networks?

SS: JDSU provides solutions that cover the whole lifecycle of networks and services, and this will continue in the era of virtualised environments. Specifically for a CSP, JDSU solutions will provide performance testing of network capacity and services before these are released into service. In addition JDSU will provide monitoring and trouble-shooting of the network and services while they are in commercial operation. To do this, our solutions will obviously have to be able to operate in a virtualised environment, including the ability to insert and access traffic at virtual network interfaces. However, compared to their use in physical networks, there is another very significant difference – in virtualised networks our test and assurance solutions need to be able to configure and execute their functions automatically and in real-time.

When an NFV network reconfiguration is requested, our solutions must be automatically test the new configuration and immediately start monitoring this new configuration when it is released. What this means is that our solutions become part of the operational equipment – a substantial change.

VP: We’ve heard that JDSU is involved in a virtualisation-related TM Forum Catalyst Project. What does that involve?

SS: As you may know, every TM Forum catalyst project is sponsored by a service provider and AT&T is the sponsor of this project. The project name is

‘Business-Agile NFV Orchestration’ and the project objective is to illustrate how service providers need to harness appropriate analytics and dynamically defined policies to optimise the business value delivered by NFV orchestration. In this sense, it is a confirmation of the critical success factor of the ability for the NFV orchestrator to request good network configuration and re-configuration decisions that I described above. In addition to AT&T, the other companies involved in the project are JDSU, Microsoft and Ericsson. The project outline was described at the TM Forum Digital Disruption event in December 2014 and the main demonstration is planned for the TM Forum World event in June 2015 in Nice, France.

VP: Can you summarise why JDSU believes it is the right NSE partner for CSPs planning to introduce virtualised networks and services?

SS: There are two main reasons why we believe that JDSU is an optimum partner for CSPs planning to introduce virtualised networks and services – the readiness of our solutions to support NFV environments and the NFV domain expertise and experience provided by our staff. The latter factor is in many ways a direct consequence of the first, since the industry-leading readiness of our solutions to support virtualised environments has enabled our staff to proactively participate in early NFV trials and industry forums.

Let me give you some examples of both these factors. We recently launched a virtualised version of TrueSpeed, our leading RFC 6349 based TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) throughput test solution. The traffic analysis agents within our xSIGHT Customer Experience Assurance solution are software-only agents that we have already deployed in virtualised form in early NFV proof of concept trials. As well as engaging with CSPs in some of the earliest NFV trials, our staff are actively involved in key NFV industry forums, including the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) and the TM Forum ZOOM (Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management) programme.

I talked before about our involvement in a TM Forum NFV catalyst project, but a network equipment ‘NFV Maturity Model’ proposed by JDSU is expected to be adopted shortly within the ZOOM programme. So, in summary, it is the combination of our solutions and our people that make JDSU an ideal NFV enablement partner.

VP: We saw the recent announcement that JDSU will soon split into two companies. How will this split generally impact your plans to address virtualized environments? 

SS: Splitting JDSU in two will obviously provide both new companies with an increased focus on their respective target markets. In NewCo, the interim name for the NSE spin-off, we are also transforming the culture and strategy of our company. In particular, we plan to become much more agile in our execution – the rate of change in communications has become much faster over recent years and this new business environment will require companies able to execute strategy faster, with more flexibility and adaptability. We plan to be such a company.

As our CSP customers around the world are reengineering their networks around the cloud, involving new technologies such as NFV, SDN and Cloud RANs, we in NewCo will pursue a cloud-centric test and assurance strategy to meet their evolving needs. JDSU is the number one network and service enablement company today and we intend to ensure that the new company will retain that industry leadership position in this brave new cloud-based world.

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