nfv mano: competitive dynamics and solution assessments

Advisory Report

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Snow, David | June 30, 2016

J Summary

IssueNetwork functions virtualization (NFV) is considered by operators and vendors alike to be the most important transformation that the network industry has undertaken in its history. NFV promises to provide operators with the ability to deliver increased service revenues, automate many if not all network functions, reduce the cost of the infrastructure needed to support new services, and provide the scale needed to meet exploding traffic demands. The next generation service delivery architecture requires an effective network infrastructure that supports network functions and services with typical carrier-grade attributes such as guaranteed SLA performance, reliability and elastic scaling.The following reference architecture outlines the key building blocks that must work in concert to support carrier-grade virtualized network services. This report, one of three, focuses on NFV management and network orchestration (MANO), which includes the NFV orchestrator (NFVO) and the virtual network function manager (VNFM). The NFV infrastructure (NFVI)/virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM), and software defined network (SDN) controllers are addressed inseparate reports.

ETSI NFV Reference Architecture:

NFV MANO: Competitive Dynamics and Solution AssessmentsAdvisory Report

Snow, David Current Analysis Principal Analyst, IP Services Infrastructure

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Our analysis indicates that NFV MANO solutions have progressed considerably over the past 12 months – many operators are transitioning, with the help of vendors, from proofs of concept (PoCs) to trials, andmany are now addressing the practicalities of launching commercial services. Some indeed have progressed further and launched commercial services, such as virtualized voice-over-LTE (vVoLTE) albeit mostly at VIM levels of orchestration but increasingly at the VNFM and even NFVO levels of orchestration despite the lack of complete ETSI MANO specifications.

This report provides a description and comparison of various leading MANO solutions based on a number of operator buying criteria, each supported by a number of high level solution metrics.

MANO: Defining the MarketWhile this report focuses on the NFVO and VNFM, NFV MANO cannot simply be relegated purely to a discussion of this functionality alone. The NFVO has multiple interfaces, but one of the most critical is with the carrier OSS and to oversee service provisioning and assurance and may (or may not) also provide end-to-end service orchestration (SO) – a topic which continues to attract much discussion and debate. Similarly, the VNFM remains undefined in terms of its functionality in relation to what the virtual network functions (VNFs) do for themselves, what element management and network management systems (EMS/NMS) already provide and VNFM functionality provided by the NFVO or specialized VNFM suppliers. For further details on MANO market trends and drivers please see NFV MANO Market Assessment, March 29, 2016.

MANO: Assessing the MarketBefore assessing solutions or products Current Analysis has identified what factors are important to carriers in procuring MANO solutions to support the rollout of their NFV-based services. These criteria, listed below and defined more rigorously in a later section, have been used to assess the various major vendor solutions available today.

• OverallSolutionPortfolio• FunctionalSupport• Integration&Interworking• VNF&NetworkServiceSupport• Deployability

Key Takeaways• Despite debates over MANO functionality apportionment across the OSS, NFVO and EMS/VNFM and

incomplete standardization, vendor NFV MANO solutions have made rapid progress over the past year.• While many NFV deployments employ orchestration at the VIM level only, VNFM-level orchestration is

growing and some NFVO-level orchestration is now operational.• All compared vendors have strong MANO product portfolios, and while some are still monolithic,

interoperability with other vendors’ NFVI, VIM and SDN controller offering is generally high.• Not all vendors have taken the opportunity yet to differentiate their NFV MANO offerings by employing

innovative technologies or extending the role of orchestration beyond ETSI expectations.• Vendors vary considerably in the numbers of third-party VNFs supported at VNFM level, although most

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have taken a proactive approach to developing VNF vendor ecosystems.• While some vendors now claim the high ground of live NFVO deployments interworking into carriers’

OSS, others have not yet reached that point and/or are restricted in disclosing details.

J Perspective

Current PerspectiveAs indicated above, any practical NFV MANO assessment begins by identifying the major factors important to carriers in a procurement process, and the criteria on which they will base a decision to purchase. Each criterion is assessed using a combination of vendor-supplied responses to metrics requests from Current Analysis compiled during June 2016.

MANO: Buying Criteria• SolutionPortfolio: The breadth of a vendor’s MANO portfolio is initially assessed in ETSI architectural

terms and includes the vendor’s support for the VNFM and NFVO. However, experience has shown thatmore MANO functions and more functional decomposition is needed than ETSI currently specifies, sonew portfolio components have emerged. For example, the VNFM may include variants such as a genericVNFM (VNFM-G) to orchestrate simple VNFs and application-specific VNFMs (VNFM-S) for morecomplex VNFs or VNF/PNF combinations. Other vendor variants include element management system(EMS)/VNFM combinations. Some NFVO solutions also differentiate between resource orchestration(NFV-RO) of the VNFM and VIM and service orchestration (NFV-SO), supporting service levelfunctions such as provisioning, configuration, orchestration and assurance. All in all, the breadth of avendor’s MANO portfolio is an indicator of its ability to help carriers address orchestration challenges atindividual VNF, network and service levels in both a pragmatic and evolutionary manner.

• FunctionalSupport: While the breadth of a vendor’s MANO portfolio is important, so too is the quality ofits orchestration. This will largely depend on the orchestration technologies employed, principally policymanagement and analytics working in a closed loop. While policy management is usually MANO vendor-specific, some operators look for continuity with their existing service assurance analytics providers andcall for MANO vendors to integrate third-party analytics functionality with their NFVO. Not only that,but the NFVO is steadily accumulating more and more network responsibility such as for NFV securityand/or VNF licensing orchestration. There are now attempts, via industry initiatives such as OPNFV,Open MANO and OPEN-O, to introduce open source software functionality into the NFVO and/or theVNFM and to include SO function. A vendor’s MANO offering can therefore also be assessed in terms ofits openness and the sophistication of its orchestration and supporting technologies.

• Integration&Interworking: MANO, of course, is only one part of a carrier’s complete NFV installation.It is imperative, therefore, that a high degree of interface flexibility and proven interworking is supportedin order to avoid vendor lock-in and enable MANO solutions to integrate with existing carrier productsand systems. As the diagram above shows, major MANO interfaces are with the various forms of NFVI,VIM and (not shown) SDN Controllers that provide operating platforms and networking resources. Inthe case of the NFVI, the ability of MANO to service enhanced platform awareness (EPA) requests isalso a key facet in addressing the high media traffic and strict latency requirements of carrier networks. Inaddition, NFV installations are more often than not required to interwork with existing physical networkfunctions (PNFs) in hybrid (PNF/VNF) carrier networks for which the end-to-end network and servicelevel orchestration is required. Finally, OSS/BSS systems are necessarily within the scope of any MANOinteroperability assessment in order to to ensure that any MANO solution fits within the carrier’s wider ITsystems environment required for commercial service rollout.

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• VNF&NetworkServiceSupport:The ability of a NFV MANO to instantiate and orchestrate an assortedportfolio of VNFs from multiple vendors into a commercial network service across a distributednetwork infrastructure is the end game of NFV. To this end we have assessed the capability of a vendor’sMANO offering to support this objective through the various levels of orchestration, from initial VNFonboarding, VIM level orchestration, through to VNFM orchestration and finally network serviceorchestration from the NFVO, which can also include PNF elements in the service graph. As a measure ofthis, we also assess support for complex network service orchestration, such as for VoLTE or virtual CPE(vCPE) service rollouts.

• Deployability:Finally, the ease with which a vendor’s NFV MANO offering can be deployed in a carrierenvironment is assessed. This is based on the vendor’s deployment metrics which also helps to validateits interoperability credentials. However, it also includes an analysis of how the carrier itself can besupported by the MANO vendor in terms of bringing pre-onboarded and pre-validated VNFs from notonly the MANO vendor but, more importantly, third party VNF vendors. Most vendors have set upNFV ecosystems, developer portals and supply professional services to facilitate this process. Going onestep further, MANO vendors also need to assist the carrier with the capability to easily create, modify anddeploy (and retire) new services in a “DevOps” fashion.

MANO: Competitive Solutions SummaryThe results of this first formal assessment of vendor MANO offerings are shown in the following figure. Metrics have been color-coded to highlight comparatively strong (green), weak (red), and average (yellow) rankings, while text is used to call out supporting functionality or related quantitative information.

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MANO: Competitive Positioning and AssessmentFor all the above vendors, an overall Current Analysis ranking (Vulnerable, Competitive, Strong, Very Strong, Leader) has been assigned, supported by a justification and recommended vendor actions:

Amdocs: Competitive Amdocs’ Network Cloud Service Orchestrator (NCSO) performs well across almost all criteria. The company was one of the first to highlight the imperative of continuous real-time fulfillment and assurance of NFV-based services using its “Sensei” technology. Unsurprisingly, NCSO also offers tight integration with Amdocs’ telco IT assets, particularly on the information/data model side, and the company has been successful in onboarding a wide variety of third-party VNFs. Nevertheless, while supporting both the VNF developer and the operator with onboarding and system design tools, Amdocs’ offering appears more monolithic than most, with no unbundled VNFM offering or evidence of flexibility toward third party OSS or service orchestration offerings. To offset these concerns and to prove the attractiveness of its

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solution, Amdocs now needs to show evidence of commercial deployment.

Cisco: Very Strong Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) NFVO was derived from its acquisition of Tail-f Systems and, together with its Elastic Services Controller (ESC) VNFM, represent the company’s primary ETSI-compliant MANO assets forming part of its wider NFV offering, the Evolved Services Platform (ESP). As part of its MANO offering, Cisco has also added its Virtual Topology System (VTS) to enhance its SDN control capabilities, and equipped its MANO offering with security and licensing orchestration to a degree less evident in most other compared offerings. However, when it comes to MANO deployments at various orchestration levels, the company is unable to disclose any quantitative information, though the company points toward work with high profile operators in the U.S. and Europe. Cisco needs to provide more visibility of its MANO offering in live operation supporting third-party VNFs to validate and demonstrate the competitive advantages of its solution.

Ericsson: Strong Unlike competitive products from most major network equipment rivals, the Ericsson Cloud Manager (ECM) is surrounded by a continuum of market leading products in both network and telco IT (OSS/BSS) domains. As such, the company’s offering is well placed to bring the best of both worlds into its MANO offering and help carriers bridge the divide. True to form, Ericsson has equipped ECM with strong orchestration capability embodied in its COMPA (Control, Orchestration, Management, Policy and Analytics) Framework and has also merged VNFM with EMS functionality in the Ericsson Network Manager (ENM) to ease operator challenges in hybrid network operation and evolving to NFV. Nevertheless, despite significantly ramping up the number of ECM commercial contracts during 2016, the company reports only one live deployment orchestrating third party VNFs. Ericsson needs to increase that number and consider the advantages of launching its own multi-vendor VNF ecosystem to avoid ECM being portrayed as a platform for Ericsson VNFs only.

HPE: Very Strong HPE is unique among this comparison of NFV MANO offerings in being the only vendor that does not include its own VNFs in its overall NFV solution. As such, it is able to differentiate itself toward carriers and VNF vendors alike, endowing its NFV Director NFVO and VNFM with multi-vendor VNF credentials from the outset. HPE’s OpenNFV vendor ecosystem includes VNF (and VNFM) onboarding, validation and multi-level certification providing operators with close to an “app store” experience. HPE is also very strong in deployability, claiming multiple live NFVO deployments all of which interface to third party carrier OSSs. However, there is one area which HPE has been notably slow to address: NFV security. Whether security is simply one attribute of orchestration or needs more explicit treatment by dedicated MANO functionality remains a debatable issue; nevertheless HPE needs to make its position clearer.

Huawei: Strong Huawei’s MANO offering has only recently become more visible to the market as a distinct element of its overarching Infrastructure Enabling System (IES), branded as “CloudOpera”. CloudOpera ICT-Orchestrator, alongside ICT-Assurance, orchestrates across all cloud, SDN/NFV and legacy network resources and interfaces to Huawei’s NFVO. Huawei has been careful to promote the multi-vendor capabilities of its offering, is very widely engaged in many PoCs, trials and NFV deployments and is one of the few vendors in this comparison to reveal that its offering is in live operation with a third party OSS. However, while it is evident that Huawei has invested much R&D into the VIM (OpenStack) level, its VNFM and NFVO are not yet marked out with any differentiating features. The company should consider introducing VNF licensing orchestration into its offering, which it currently sees as outside the scope of NFV MANO.

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Netcracker: Leader Netcracker has emerged as the overall leader in this first formal comparison of vendor MANO offerings. While the complexity of the company’s telco IT portfolio and latest SDN/NFV operationalization offering, the Agile Virtualization Platform (AVP) is very high, there can be little doubt as to its comprehensiveness in providing a platform capable of supporting almost every aspect of the carrier journey. Netcracker’s NFVO and VNFM, located in the Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) suite of AVP, are among the most functionally sophisticated, particularly in security and licensing, but it is the operational wrap and the onboarding of a very high number of third party VNFs and their orchestration to VNFM level which provides the company’s solution its leading position. Netcracker has also successfully carried these capabilities forward into live MANO deployments at NFVO level including integrations with carrier OSSs. Nevertheless, while Netcracker’s platform and services offering is very comprehensive, it may be too heavyweight and monolithic for smaller carriers.

Nokia: Very Strong The integration of acquired Alcatel-Lucent assets into the new Nokia CloudBand offering has provided an opportunity for the company to both enrich and restructure its NFV MANO offering. Among compared solutions, Nokia remains one of the clearest in terms of the functional separation between NFVO, VNFM and OSS/EMS components. Nokia has also declared its intention to introduce more open source software into its VNFM, the CloudBand Application Manager, as it has also done in making significant contributions to Openstack VIM projects such as “Vitrage” for root cause analysis. Nokia also scores well in terms of easing deployability for carriers and VNF vendors alike with its CloudBand Ecosystem, likely the longest running and best known in the industry and supports cloud platform verification not just as a professional service, but also as a feature of its VNFM. However, when it comes to meeting the challenges of live NFVO operation and interfacing to existing carrier OSS, Nokia appears to be behind the curve, despite its well-received “Lean Ops” initiative; this is the area in which Nokia now needs to show solid evidence of traction.

Oracle: Strong Oracle Communications’ Network Service Orchestrator (OC NSO) delivers all expected functionality, being surrounded by Oracle’s wider portfolio of NFV offerings including its OSS and NFVI offerings. NSO is showing steady traction as a multi-vendor VNF platform, onboarding an increasing number of third party partner VNFs, and capable of orchestrating complex network services such as VoLTE and VoWiFi. Oracle also demonstrates a clear distinction between customer and network facing orchestration functions and has shown practical innovation around the management of composite (combined PNF/VNF) network functions in its VNFM-S, the Oracle Communications Application Orchestrator (OCAO). It has also been active and customer-driven in the integration of specific third party analytics packages into its orchestration schema. While deployment successes at either VNFM and/or NFVO levels are undisclosed, conversations with officials indicate an increasing market “pull” for NSO. Notwithstanding, proof points are still required to validate NSO’s interoperability with third party OSSs.

ZTE: Competitive Like Huawei, ZTE’s MANO offering has only recently become visible to the wider market, firstly through PoCs and then through large Chinese operator engagements, such as with China Mobile for vRCS. ZTE’s “EasyMANO” vManager includes both NFVO and VNFM functionality, but as yet these components do not appear to have been deployed separately. That said, vManager has evidently been successful in supporting multiple third party VNF deployments. ZTE is also one of the few vendors in this comparison to reveal that its offering is in live operation interfacing to third party OSSs from rivals. Nevertheless, ZTE’s vManager is not yet marked out by any differentiating features and the company must now prove to the market that its offering is not just a monolithic, “fit for purpose” offering, but one also capable of delivering competitive advantage for carriers over and above those of its rivals.

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MANO: Looking ForwardThe results of this first solution level assessment of vendor’s offerings show that the competitive landscape clearly portrays the ongoing contest between network and IT vendors to own the NFV MANO space. Not only that, but the vendor rankings of players from both domains are also relatively evenly distributed. However, it needs to be remembered that this simply reflects a “starting position” in what will be a long race and there are many factors which will shape the market over the next year, not least the impact of the multiple open source MANO initiatives which have recently emerged. When the next assessment is made, we will be looking for the ways in which vendors are handling the open source issue together with progress toward differentiating their solutions and, of course, success in MANO deployments supporting live commercial NFV-based service rollouts.

nfv mano: competitive dynamics and solution assessments

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