I am attending the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in Dusseldorf this week and the event kicked off with the Open Network Foundation/Software Defined Networking (ONF/SDN) Workshop chaired by Marc Cohn of ONF/Ciena for an exciting week of the latest on SDN, NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and Open Networking.

One of the key early presentations on NFV that generated a lot of interest from the audience and caught my eye was from Tetsuya Nakamura, Senior Research Engineer at NTT Docomo and Vice Chair of ETSI NFV ISG. Mr. Nakamura presented NTT Docomo’s use case on NFV and their plans for the future to go from Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to deployment by March 2016 (NTT issued a Press Release today). Driven by the earthquake disaster in 2011, NTT Docomo embarked upon a project backed by the Japanese government to address the shortcomings of existing networks with regards to addressing large 50 fold spikes in voice traffic on their mobile network during a two-hour period of the disaster. As a result, NTT Docomo has been working closely with multiple vendors on virtual Evolved Packet Core (EPC) NFV proof of concepts.

Mr. Nakamura emphasized some of the goals of the NFV and SDN-enabled network and they were tied to High Reliability, Flexible Traffic Control, On-Demand Scalability and Capex reduction.  He also illustrated examples of how these goals apply to the specific disaster recovery scenarios associated with their network. Eventually, three key interfaces within the NFV architecture need to be defined: VNFI Platform to VNF application layer which the newly formed OPNFV is focused on (among other VNFI aspects), the VNF Management interface between the Orchestrator and VNF Managers, and the OSS control interface between the OSS/BSS systems and the Orchestrator.

GENBAND, leveraging our multiple real-time communications Virtual Network Functions (VNF) applications, is in the midst of multiple PoCs with our key ecosystem partners such as HP to bring differentiated NFV solutions to market. Today, HP announced that leading telecommunications organizations including GENBAND have joined the HP OpenNFV Program as technology partners to help carriers take advantage of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology. The HP OpenNFV Program is designed to help the telecommunications industry accelerate innovation and launch services faster, more easily and more cost-effectively.