In The Hague Netcracker announced its new Business Cloud solution, with a first announced customer Telefonica Mexico. Netcracker is supporting Telefonica Mexico in providing SDWAN solutions to its medium to large enterprise customers under the “NextWAN” product banner.
Getting beyond “How many VNFs can dance on a pin?”
Appledore believe this announcement is important because of the distinct business model and service agility that Telefonica Mexico is getting from this solution. Netcracker is providing a full stack SDN/NFV/IT (includes BSS,OSS, orchestration, digital marketplace etc.) solution as a service to Telefonica Mexico hosted from its US data centres. By providing a full stack cloud solution Netcracker claims that it has reduced the innovation cycle from months/years to weeks. In so doing, it has enabled Telefonica Mexico to rapidly enter the Mexican SDWAN market with a solution that can grow with that market.
At last, the SDN/NFV discussion seems to be moving away from technology and endless internal Proof of Concepts to business and real products.
Competing with the real challengers
Sanjay Mewada, Netcracker’s Chief Strategy Officer noted in the analyst briefing that in SDWAN the long term challenges for the telcos come from competition from the WebScale players, such as Business Skype. In competing against these players (or even collaborating with them) telcos need order of magnitude changes in speed of service innovation/agility and they need infrastructure that can sustain this.
Appledore explore the economic opportunities of virtualized networks in our market outlook.