As the participation in the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) domain continues to rapidly grow, it was getting difficult to keep straight which companies played in what aspect of the overall NFV landscape and architecture. Out of that murkiness was born this NFV landscape view as an attempt to visually represent participation in the movement.

Every couple of decades or so, the telecommunications industry goes through a technology transition – analog to digital, for example – that profoundly impacts the way services are created and delivered, as well as the business models behind them. The ongoing and steady distillation of communications functions and features into pure software, which can be executed on generic and elastic hardware resources, is one of those industry-altering transitions.

In just a few short years, the communications industry has been turned on its head. While traditional telecom operators often defined the manner in which subscribers would communicate – voice or SMS, for the most part – end users are now much more influential in calling the shots.

Despite the widespread use in the past decade of IP-based communications systems known as IP PBXs, the TDM pipes that connect those enterprise platforms to the public network have only slowly been replaced by IP connections. For multiple reasons, the most prominent being the desire of some network operators to preserve a fairly hefty cash cow of TDM T1s, E1s and PRIs, this IP-based connectivity service – commonly referred to as SIP Trunking – is only now hitting its groove.