May 2017
Grant Lenahan, Appledore Research Group
If I might summarize the impression from Netcracker’s 2017 analyst day, positioning Netcracker 12, it would “let’s quit messing with technology and make and-2-end services profitable, then make the next move”. Fair enough.
Appledore Research Group attended the NEC/Netcracker 2017 Analyst Summit, in Cannes, France ahead of TMF Live! where Netcracker’s management team introduced Netcracker 12 and outlined its business strategy for managing virtual (and hybrid) networks. Netcracker is addressing virtualization and process modernization by focusing on specific services and their associated business cases, yielding a self-funding bootstrap model as well as well defined, unambiguous requirements.
This strategy shines a light on Netcracker 12’s strengths and philosophy. It is unabashedly a fully-integrated “full stack” in NetCracker’s own words. This shines an interesting light on the industry: this full stack approach is in response to market demand and desire to reduce deployment risk, and yet it also conflicts with many CSPs’ publicly stated desire to have open ecosystems, increase the use of open-source, and reduce their dependency on any specific vendor. And yet it addresses very real costs (and cost = time) in operations. Let’s look at the inherent strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Netcracker 12 or any fully integrated operations suite.
Here is the full report and our SWOT from Cannes, France 2017.
https://appledoreresearch.com/report/netcracker-12-and-hybrid-virtualization/