It has been a whirlwind two months since I joined OPNFV in January. I recently spent three weeks on the road getting to know our community and seeing OPNFV in a broader market context, and it’s been a great experience. Our technical committee chair Chris Price wrote about our recent Meet-up and Hackfest and the only thing I’ll add to his great summary is that I was highly impressed by the passion and collaborative attitude I witnessed during those events. It’s not always an easy thing for a diverse group of people all working for different companies to come together and form a coherent community, but we are definitely on our way.
After the Prague Hackfest, I flew to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, which left absolutely no doubt that NFV is a big deal. Light Reading’s pre-show poll showed that NFV and SDN were considered by conference-goers as the most important topics there, and it was great to see all the demos of NFV capabilities on display at our members’ booths. It was highly educational to see how our member companiesare thinking about technology and how they’re putting the concepts into products. To everyone who gave me a tour of your booth – thanks! It was inspiring to see some cool use cases such as vIMS, vCPE and cloud RAN along with a unique example of dynamically allocating mobile capacity to either the suburbs or downtown depending on time and day and user density. It’s obvious that NFV will not only improve operational efficiency and agility, but enable end users to think differently about their network services as well.
