The incremental and exponential growth of technology has without a doubt interrupted business operations. Giving the level of disruption from small to medium-sized and even large corporations it’s forced all of these sectors to migrate some if not all of their services to the cloud. A Business Wire press release confirmed that cloud services market will increase to 34.9 billion by 2018.
The arrival of cloud has sort of revamped the Information Technology (IT) industry. In addition, network functions virtualization (NFV) is also known as virtual network function (VNF) that offers a new way to design, deploy and manage networking services, according to SDxCentral.com. NFV is rapidly transforming the communications industry by enabling communication service providers (CSP) from limitations of proprietary hardware.
The trends have forced businesses to adopt or be left behind by the technology. Oracle, the multinational computer technology corporation, at the LTE World Summit 2015 announced the release of four products: Oracle Communications Session Border Controller, Oracle Communications Converged Application Server, Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper and Oracle Communications Policy Management.
Elsewhere an eWeek.com analysis emphasized how NFV is going to move the needle with the announcement of these four Oracle products. The networking report asserts that NFV can move various network tasks like from load balancing and firewalls to intrusion detection and prevention.
“The communications industry is in an era of major transformation and Oracle Communications is perfectly positioned to provide CSPs with a world-class, virtualized network,” said Doug Suriano, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications. “We have worked over the last year to provide a fully virtualized, NFV-ready portfolio to support this evolution. Communications networks are now software-based, and no one understands that better than Oracle.”
What are the benefits of NFV? So NFV virtualizes network services via software with the ability to enable its operators to do the following: reduce CapEx, reduce OpEX, accelerate time-to-market, and deliver agility and flexibility.
Reducing capEx means cutting down on the need to purchase purpose-built hardware and supporting pay-as-you-grow models. Furthermore, reduce the management of network services, the space, power and cooling requirements of equipment.
The acceleration time-to market is basically decreasing the time to deploy networking services to better support changing business requirements. Finally, the delivery of agility and flexibility is to quickly scale up or down services to better address the evolving demands. The complete information on benefits of NFV can be reviewed on SDxCentral.
Core explanations and breakdown of Oracle´s four products
The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper is designed to manage the whole application program interface (API) lifecycle. The benefits that comes with it is a faster time to market and increase revenue. It is an attractive option to third-party developers and partners with easy scalability.
The Oracle Communications Policy Management is central component for the deployment of next-generation LTE networks. Everyone is familiar with the headaches of deployment and transitioning existing IT infrastructure. Now the positive is the product is built with complex policy rules with an integrated easy-to-use wizard. You also get a rate of return on investment (ROI) and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
The Oracle Communications Session Border Controller aids CSPs provide a complete range of secure and reliable fixed line along with mobile services, according to Oracle. The product adds layers of security, reliability and quality, regulatory compliance, revenue and cost optimization, etc.
Finally, the Oracle Communications Converged Application server utilizes a modular architecture to build communications services. In other words, it speeds the development and deployment of carrier-grade converged IP services lowering the cost associated with it. Above all it delivers a high performance and low latency.
Conclusions and takeaways
The cloud industry interrupted how businesses were going about their efforts. Now the NFV is changing communications as we know it. All of these enhancements were made and modified as a result of the growing demands by what consumers and enterprises expect in the new digital economy. In a nutshell they wanted their needs to be met.
In a white paper by Oracle they did conclude that while NFV is getting implemented increasingly nowadays CSPs have to assure that they can maintain the control and visibility of their networks.
Finally, it is going to be interesting to see how much investment goes towards these new communications technologies and how each sector will adjust its business operations to adopt them. Streamlining and virtualization will continue to occur to meet the demands of consumers and all parties alike.
