Virtualization key to connected world
Taking a step back from the technical minutia around SDN and NFV, Amol Phadke, Global Lead Network Virtualization, Accenture, reminded the morning keynote audience at Broadband World Forum what NFV and SDN is really all about: connectivity.
“For every person on the planet, we’ll have five to 10 devices per human being by the end of next year,” said Phadke. “But it doesn’t stop there. 80% of humanity is going to be connected by some network in the next couple of years. 80% of us are going to be using apps and the whole way to access online channels and activity is going to be very different.”
Put simply, the networks that providers built and designed over the last 10 years is not going to be able to cope with such demand. “There is so much going around hyper-cloud, mobility, security, big data analytics, that render these networks incapable of supporting these requirements,” said Phadke. “They have to evolve.”
All of humanity connected to five to 10 devices per person requires a pervasive network powered by SDN and NFV because that is the only way that the evolution is going to be able to stay in step with the demand that is coming from the market, said Phadke.
He then added as an aside (as if was the simplest thing in the world): “And by the way, we will need to go beyond the boundary of the individual telco networks to have a collaboration of networks in a federated model that acts as a platform to offer applications and services.”
Good luck with that Accenture – and when it happens, I hope everyone gets matching Federation of Telcos matching uniforms.
