Communication service providers love minimizing their cost base while maximizing their revenue streams. Yes, I may have captioned the obvious here, but it is easy to see that these are conflicting goals as in, it takes money to make money! In recent years, SDN/NFV has been touted as the glue that converges these goals. As such, a wave of migrations started a few years ago, as CSPs began to virtualize their network infrastructures. Along the way, a chilling realization hit the CSPs: the migration is not as easy as advertised as they faced major hurdles in recruiting scarce (and expensive) labor and simultaneously finding ways to beat their competitors by faster migration period. CSPs were also told that SDN/NFV relieves them of vendor lock-in issues. But they soon realized that avoiding vendor lock-in comes with an increase in deployment complexity and costs. It really isn’t simple to integrate multiple best-of-breed discrete system components (hardware, NFVI, VIMs, Open vSwitches, SDN Controller, a host of VNFs and VNFMs). But if CSPs tried to use the other route and use a pre- or partially integrated solution, they faced the issues associated with vendor lock-in.

Read more Is there an economically optimal approach in migration to NFV?