Save Money Here and Now

When was the last time you won the lottery?  If you are like me, it's a pretty rare occasion indeed.  The same probability can be applied to increasing the budget allocation for any business and especially for service providers.  What can service providers do to save money now, enabling them to invest in new services and boost revenues?   Network functions virtualization (NFV) comes to the rescue, with help of course,fromsoftware defined networking (SDN), and open source innovations.

SDN and NFV represent a significant change in networking as we currently know it. Together and separately, both target cost savings, operational complexity, and network optimization -and both hold much promise for the operator. As with all things offering great potential rewards, one must balance these benefits and address the associated risks accordingly when deploying them.

For service providers, the data center is leading target for SDN and NFV deployments. Given all the activity focused on cloud computing, content delivery, and anything-as-a-service (XaaS) offerings, the service provider data centers must advance across many fronts (security, automation, mobility, reliability analytics, and provisioning) to be successful.

Interestingly, all operatorsgive almost equal consideration to capital and operating expenses when evaluating their network state and possible network solutions. While current budget breakdowns are typically 75 percent for opex and 25 percent for capex, SDN and NFV solutions must deliver cost savings on both fronts if the promises of SDN and NFV are to be fully realized.  SDN and NFV benefits must also drive high impact immediately. Optimizing the "here and now" is far more important to many operators than accelerating the "there and then."

Operators can efficiently harness their existing network and data center assets with the Cisco Evolved Services Platform (ESP), automating and provisioning all of their services in real-time at web speed. Service providers can also now offer amazing new services accelerating revenue growth at much faster rates.

Be sure to join us along with our industry colleagues from Century Link, Level 3, NTT America, Orange, XO Communications and many more at the NFV and the Data Center event in Santa Clara next month to continue our dialogue and move forward on this exciting journey. We'll be part of the "Distributed VS. Centralized NFV" panel from 1:45 -12:30 PM Pacific Time.

For more on this topic, read and share this short overview.

For questions about the Cisco Evolved Services Platform (ESP), tweet @CiscoSP360.