Patrick Kelly, Appledore Research Group How much investment in virtualization technology is occurring today relative to overall capital spending? AT&T has made public claims in both the press and major industry events that it has virtualized 34% of its SDN network but what does this mean? Is it 34% of its IP network domain? Is it 34% of its network traffic transiting the virtualized components of its network? Or is it 34% of its CAPEX spending now reallocated to SDN and NFV components (highly unlikely)? The point is nobody really knows how to interpret the AT&T numbers because details of the claims are largely absent and no baseline in the industry exist at this stage. That is the nature of an emerging market. Virtualization on its own achieves very little. It is when you combine it with automation that the two implementations begin to yield the business with competitive advantages and substantial operating efficiencies. The industry is at T minus 0 now on virtualization of the infrastructure. We can point to evidence where many deployments are occurring at different rates driven by the CAPEX benefits and use cases. Automation is at T minus 3! We see very little evidence in […]