Key to NFV Is Organizational Buy-In – BT's Sabey

BT's approach to NFV and the broader world of virtualized networks is to offer customers a variety of options that empower them to control their virtualized environments or to offload all or part of the task to BT, according to Jim Sabey, the carrier's head of connect and compute sales specialists.

In the second part of this Q&A with Telco Transformation, Sabey says that BT has deployed 15 of the planned 50 service nodes that quarterback NFV and broader virtualization operations. From the carrier's point of view, the key to upskilling the workforce was to thoroughly understand NFV and of the other elements in a network. In part one, Sabey discussed automation's impact on NFV and service agility. (See {736619}.)

Telco Transformation: What advice would you give carriers just starting with NFV?

Jim Sabey: They really need to all embrace the technology. Essentially educate all their employees to be part of the journey.

If you don't have buy-in from all the different parts of the organization, that's where we've seen failure at BT. I've been at BT for more than 14 years. When we've actually rolled out certain solutions in which we didn't have buy-in from everybody else in the organization, all the various departments, it failed. We've succeeded when we actually took time to educate and inform everyone about the technology, what it is and what it does. That's when you get buy in from multiple organizations.

People in general don't like change. Being able to educate them on what it is that's coming, some of the tactical things -- What is YANG? What is NETCONF? You have to get those things out there.

What BT did before we even started down the road of NFV and SD-WAN is that we actually started a widespread enablement of our sales and specialist teams across the globe. We took time to actually upskill them so that they understood, essentially, why customers want it to begin with.

TT: What's on BT's virtualization roadmap?

JS: One of the neat things we're doing is that we're actually going to be launching our own app store. So we're going to offer a iOS, or Android-type app store, but at a network level. (See BT Gears Up for More Virtualization.)

Customers will be able to go out and download the apps, or the virtual network functions, the VNFs, onto an agile CPE. We are initially going to be supporting what's called Cisco ENCS (enterprise network compute system), what's called the UCS E blade and Cisco routers. Customers can actually download virtual network functions either to Cisco ENCSs or to a UCS E blade and a Cisco router. So if they have a router at a site and they also have a firewall out there today, they can get rid of that firewall and have that function be virtual instead of having yet another appliance that they have to worry about maintaining and so on. Customers want to lessen their footprint in their locations.

We're also investing heavily -- it's over a £12 million [$16 million] investment total -- in what we call dynamic network services. One of those investment areas is also around these cloud service nodes. About 15 of them are in place and they will grow to 50. Basically these cloud service nodes are really exciting because it's going to give customers end-to-end control of their applications in terms of visibility, acceleration and protection like security but not have all of those things on their site.

The VNFs, the vision and the roadmap for BT, is that we're going to offer both a fully managed option, but then also maybe a partially managed option where customers can host even some of their own applications in our app store as well. I think of an industry like retail, or automotive, or healthcare. This may involve specific applications that maybe even some of a company's competitors are using. It's something that they could actually pay for. Part of our roadmap as well is not only having the traditional WAN acceleration, firewalling, routing, types of functionalities, but also being able to have our customers put their own apps out there as well, so that some of the companies in the similar industry can use them.

Those are some of the roadmap items that are immediate. We want to make our networks more programmable as well. Such as being able to deflect something down, bandwidth and things like that. Those are all things that are in our dynamic network services portfolio.

One other thing that BT's investing heavily in is connecting to traditional data center-type companies like Equinix and CyrusOne, and some of those type organizations. That's part of our roadmap for applications and services. A lot of our customers are getting out of the data center business. They just want simple connectivity to their site, but they still potentially need a data center provider to help them. We are bringing on-net more than 250 data centers across the globe.

Also, we're partnering with cloud-based data center services as well to be able to bring more service chaining to a customer.

TT: Did NFV hit a lull last year, and if so, has it abated?

JS: I would say yes. One reason is open source and standards. There's really not a standards-based approach around NFV historically. Now -- maybe not for their main data centers or headquarters -- customers are starting to come around to the idea. The customers I'm talking to in the last four to six months are starting to come around to this idea a little more.

We are moving in the right direction because there are organizations that really like the idea of the end of the days where they had three different truck rolls. Typically at a site you'd have three services deployed. You'd have routing, you'd have some sort of firewalling to protect this site, and maybe some sort of acceleration or WAN optimization. Three truck rolls, three different guys you have to coordinate. Three different installations with three different boxes.

With NFV, customers are starting to come around to the idea now that. "Hey, all I need is an x86 server that meets certain criteria, has a certain amount of memory, RAM, hard drive space, etcetera." If that server goes down, you can even go down to Best Buy even and buy a server that meets those same sort of criteria again, or maybe even have a hot standby.

Gone are the days of waiting for the CPE guy to come in four hours because that's the SLA maintenance that you purchased. Now you'll be able to get that server up and running. Organizations are starting to come around to this idea and are saying, "Yeah, I like this. I don't have to have three truck rolls anymore and the money that goes with that, and the coordination efforts, and all of those things."

TT: Are hardware vendors onboard with NFV now?

JS: I would say the hardware vendors I've been talking to, they've been on board for years. It's just more of about convincing the market and our customers that it really will be okay with this approach.

TT: Any final thoughts on NFV or virtualization in general?

JS: It is really just the start. Still. As I mentioned, BT's investing and delivering the services of the future and is really making networks dynamic. For a long time, networks have just been kind of stale. They were just there to help support the applications and things of that nature.

Now, as we become a cloud services integrator, we're going continue to deliver even more cloud connectivity, make it simpler for how we connect to companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce and basically bring these cloud services to our customers.

— Carl Weinschenk, Contributing Writer, Telco Transformation