Dell'Oro Group says in a new report that network functions virtualization (NFV) has evolved to where several use cases will begin to gain traction this year.
"When we began tracking NFV several years ago, we knew the technologies and deployments would evolve over time and that forecasts would be a moving target," said Shin Umeda, vice president at the market research firm. "While we are still in the early days of NFV, we are excited to see that the potential for NFV starting to take hold in 2016."
Among the use cases Dell'Oro believes will begin to push NFV into the mainstream are virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) for enterprise and business services delivery, evolved packet core (EPC), and management and orchestration (MANO).
The NFV space has coalesced to the point that market forecasts are worthwhile, Dell'Oro believes. The recently issued "NFV Advanced Research Report" therefore includes a five-year forecast for vCPE, including premises and infrastructure components, and expanded market revenue forecasts for virtualized network functions (VNFs), with the related components for MANO, and NFV infrastructure (NFVI).
The report also includes a discussion of carrier software-defined networking (SDN). Dell'Oro believes carriers see SDN and NFV as complementary and therefore are evaluating such technologies together.
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