Survey: Network operators still see silos with SDN/NFV

Perceived vendor silos are still an issue for network operators looking to move to SDN/NFV for service virtualization. That’s just one of the revelations from a Light Reading webinar that polled hundreds of attendees on their SDN/NFV needs and challenges.

Caroline Chappel, Senior Analyst at Heavy Reading, and Recep Ozdag, Senior Director of Solution Marketing in Ciena’s Blue Planet division, tackled how to overcome the limitations of traditional operating systems through the use of multi-domain service orchestration (MDSO).

During the event, an online poll surveyed attendees on several questions surrounding their needs and attitudes towards transformation to SDN and NFV services.

When asked about the most significant challenge constraining transformation, the pool of 138 respondents was fairly well spread across the four answers. Nearly half of the respondents (46%) cited too many vendor silos as their primary hurdle, as it makes integrating SDN and NFV solutions from legacy supplies complex and expensive. The least constraining challenge (17%) was that existing solutions don’t allow DevOps-style workflows and processes for new technology integration.

However, on the question of how important self-sufficiency is to the services transformations, there was a clear standout from the 185 total responses: 65% of those surveyed cited self-sufficiency as “very important,” while only 20% cited it as “somewhat important.” A very small percentage of respondents (2%) cited the need for self-sufficiency as “not important.”

You can watch an archive of the entire transformation challenges webinar here.  Also embedded below is the presentation slide deck from the event.