HP unveils virtualisation solutions targeting telecom firms

Computer maker Hewlett-Packard (HP) today introduced a OpenNFV, a set of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) programme, in India to help telcos better cloud-enabled and converged network services and innovations.
The firm claims OpenNFV programme will aid communications service providers (CSPs), network equipment providers (NEPs) and partners reduce their capital and operating expenditure.
"Telecom industry is facing competitive pressures from over-the-top (OTT) players who are more agile, flexible and able to roll out revenue-generating services and appliances much faster than the CSPs," HP India Vice President (Sales Enterprises Group) Som Satsangi said.
Besides, CSPs are facing a rapid growth of rich media applications, which is slowing voice revenue and exploding network traffic.

"HP's OpenNFV Programme combines the firm's technology leadership with a strong partner ecosystem to enable our customers to leverage new market opportunities faster while managing spiralling costs," Satsangi said.
OpenNFV Programme enables CSPs accelerate time to market and drive new revenue. Prior to adopting NFV, CSPs managed cumbersome, individual network hardware appliances, he added.

With HP OpenNFV, they can leverage commercial off-the- shelf hardware with virtualisation to test and deploy new offerings in minutes rather than months, Satsangi said.
"At the heart of the HP's OpenNFV is OpenNFV Reference Architecture (NFV RA), which provides a complete architectural ecosystem covering physical servers, storage and networking, virtualisation, controllers for software-defined networking (SDN), resource management and orchestration, analytics, telco applications and a complete operations support system (OSS)," he said.

The HP NFV RA is based on open standards, and brings a set of HP's industry-standard products and capabilities to easily build and deploy the architecture, he added.
At present, HP Indian is assisting a telecom firm with its OpenNFV programme. Some of the services in the programme will be rolled out in six months, while the complete roll out will take about a year-and-a-half, Satsangi said.
He added that the company expects many telecom firms to roll out the complete set of solutions under the programme by 2015-16.
According to research firm Ovum, OTT social messaging applications cost CSPs USD 32.5 billion in lost SMS revenues in 2013, which is predicted to reach USD 54 billion by 2016. In 2018, OTT VoIP providers will have cost the global telecoms industry USD 63 billion in lost revenues.