The trends of cloud, mobile, social media and Big Data are driving organizations in every industry to adapt to shifting competitive landscapes, new customer expectations, and disruptions in the economics of doing business. One of the industries that is arguably most affected by this massive transformation is the Communications Service Provider industry.
Today, EMC is pleased to announce the formation of a new EMC Network Functions Virtualization Technology (NFV) Group. Through the NFV Group, EMC aims to help providers of all types – regardless of their origin as fixed, mobile, cable or alternate communications service providers – to meet their unique opportunities and challenges. I encourage you to watch this video announcement from one of our Technology Evangelists, Anton Prenneis, about today’s announcement.
Why are we doing this? Primarily to help our provider customers and partners innovate to thrive in a rapidly transforming market.
Advanced software and Internet and mobile connectivity are combining to lower barriers-to-entry, enabling new entrants to offer traditional telecom services without having to make the CAPEX investments that have historically been required. At the same time, many providers are finding ways to bundle traditional telecom services with newer services like streaming media and public cloud hosting to generate incremental revenue and increase customer loyalty. To compete in this new world, providers need a platform enabling them to rapidly build and deliver new services with minimum OPEX and maximum speed – which is what you can expect to see from the NFV Group. In particular, EMC is committing to help provider customers and partners:
- Deploy new services across global networks more quickly in pursuit of new revenue opportunities
- Analyze, and eventually monetize, the data that exists within their global networks
To help customers and partners do this, EMC is building a Communications Service Provider Cloud architecture that is based on NFV industry frameworks. The architecture will leverage technologies from a unique federation of strategically aligned businesses – EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, VMware, RSA and VCE – and will be designed to enable providers to deliver distributed, multiservice, carrier-grade Cloud solutions. Comprised of an NFVi layer, advanced data and security services, and a management & orchestration layer, the EMC Communications Service Provider Cloud architecture will make it possible to deliver traditional and non-traditional telecom services, and to use Big Data and analytics to optimize operations and create new revenue opportunities. For more technical detail on what the team is building, check out a recently published article in Connect-World Magazine.
Additionally, most major service providers’ architectures are unique to their environment. While standards exist and goals are similar, unique attributes will differentiate the capabilities each provider focuses on. To help assure that each provider can capture that unique identity and value, EMC also brings to the table the Open Innovation Lab. The Lab allows customers and partners to work deeply with EMC technologists and leverage our wide portfolio of technologies, components and products as building blocks in their overall toolkit. EMC invests billions of dollars in R&D annually and more in acquiring technology and, as such, has one of the widest arrays of technology in the industry focused on building and operationalizing clouds. Our belief is that by making that resource base available to our service provider customers – via deep collaboration – we can all move faster to operational and, most importantly, monetizable systems.
EMC has a long history of partnering with many major providers and is uniquely positioned to understand the challenges facing this industry as it transitions into the more IT-centric world of modern telecommunications. In 2013, David Goulden, CEO, EMC Information Infrastructure, described the changing telecom landscape along with key opportunities in areas such as NFV and Big Data (http://tinyurl.com/goulden-2013). Flash forward to the present… EMC is fully committing itself to this industry with the formation of this new EMC NFV group.
The group, comprised of a team of telecom industry veterans, under my leadership within EMC’s Office of the CTO, is working in tight collaboration with the global GTM organization’s team of specialists who have built their careers implementing telecommunications and cloud solutions. I’m pleased and excited about the collective expertise of this group for the benefit of our customers and partners as they build custom, next-generation telecom solutions.
We’re currently at Mobile World Congress this week talking with customers, partners and analysts about our focus on this unique market. Follow @EMCPartners for the latest news and developments, and engage in conversation by using #EMC and #MWC15.
