White Box SDN/NFV

The telecom industry has gone through massive changes in the last 10 years and will continue to evolve during the next 10. There are many drivers of change, and the most significant of these is Moore’s Law and the Tick-Tock^TM cadence of the Intel x86^TM platform. This cadence propels the evolution of the IT industry and pulls the telecom industry closer in practices and technology expectations. ABI Research forecasts that mobile network operators will embrace virtualization, beginning with the network services plane, and then moving to the control plane and data plane. The services plane represents the near-term opportunity for operators seeking a virtualized operating environment.

Mobile Broadband Operators are aware that much of the Telecom Equipment Manufacturers leverage the Intel platform into the proprietary and highly customized solutions. Having witnessed the business transformation of smaller WebScale companies, operators are seeking to leverage the data center scale economies of the IT vendors, from top tier to emerging white box vendors. Performance trends according to Intel roadmap are derived and projected over several generations and into the future to give insight of where SDN/NFV solutions are heading. 

ABI Research analyzes this market as operators will increasingly look like WebScale companies rather than traditional telecom companies. The pros and cons, strengths and weakness for the operator, the established telecom vendor, and newly emergent but potentially disruptive software vendors are discussed. The market forecasts in view of the service plane, control plane, and data plan migrating to virtualized deployments, and consideration given to commercial IT deployments in these parts of the networks.

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