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While most service providers are forging ahead with their respective SDN and NFV deployment plans, an increasing number are looking at going with NFV first.
Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Jim Hodges provided a preview of Heavy Reading's SDN/NFV Tracker Survey on Wednesday at the NFV & SDN Carrier Event in Denver.
While 31% of the operators surveyed said they planned on deploying SDN and NFV simultaneously in their networks, 24% said they would go with NFV first. On the other hand, 17% replied that they would deploy SDN first and NFV later.
"The people that are going to implement NFV first are growing compared to the SDN portion," Hodges said during his presentation. "For many operators SDN and NFV will kind of be a simultaneous journey, but for many other operators it will be NFV first."
Hodges said that some operators were still formulating their SDN/NFV deployment plans, which was born out by 27% of the survey respondents that didn't have plans in place.
When asked how important NFV was to their company's network strategy over the next two years, 40% replied "very important," 21% picked "essential" and 29% replied "somewhat important."
Overall, Heavy Reading's research said that the NFV market would grow from $2.3 billion last year to $15.6 billion by 2020. SDN growth was projected to increase from $1.58 billion in 2015 to $9.73 billion in 2020.
Hodges said Heavy Reading's SDN/NFV Tracker Survey used information from the fourth quarter of last year that became available in the first quarter of this year. The report is slated for release next week.
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation
