Predicting the future: Where next for SD-WAN?
We outline three possible pathways for SD-WAN evolution. Part 3 of a three-part mini-series exploring SD-WAN technology from an enterprise perspective.
We outline three possible pathways for SD-WAN evolution. Part 3 of a three-part mini-series exploring SD-WAN technology from an enterprise perspective.
We outline existing flavours of SD-WAN available on the market. Part 2 of a three-part mini-series exploring SD-WAN technology from an enterprise perspective.
We highlight the main networking challenges that SD-WAN is designed to address. Part 1 of a three-part mini-series exploring SD-WAN technology from an enterprise perspective.
Telcos must adapt to virtualisation and changing customer needs in the Coordination Age. Our three new telecoms business models offer a realistic agenda for telcos to build up the stack into the IT layer – either by themselves or through partnerships.
Updated analysis of STL Partners’ NFV deployment tracker. What have Europe’s major telcos done, how are vendors faring, and who leads the pack?
SDN and NFV deployment is growing deeper but not broader: the long tail lags behind the pioneers.
All telcos know they need to change. We believe the defining characteristic of those that will grow most is a clear focus on where and how they can create value beyond connectivity. This report lays out the two viable paths forward, and six steps all telcos must take in this new version of the Telco 2.0 vision.
This update to our ‘NFV Deployment Tracker’ series focuses on Asia-Pacific, alongside European and North American data to March 2018. Telcos in developed Asian markets have made a great start, and the region has outstripped Europe and North America in live SDN / NFV deployments – but can NFV scale to Asia as a whole?
IoT, 5G, edge computing and AI showed they were maturing as technologies at MWC 2018, but it’s harder to see yet how the first three make much money for telcos. AI has a different problem: the field is developing so fast that best practice is changing all the time. In this report we outline what we found, and a pragmatic approach for telcos to successfully harness these technologies and create value beyond connectivity.
This update to our ‘NFV Deployment Tracker’ series focuses on North America, alongside additional European data. 2016/7 has seen the rise of SD-WAN, enabling smaller operators to compete in the WAN market with NFV leaders AT&T, Verizon, Masergy, CenturyLink, etc. By contrast, fewer consumer use cases for NFV have yet been established.
NFV/SDN is one factor driving radical change in telco business models. This report explores the three archetypal telco NFV/SDN implementation strategies that we’ve found in the market, and the different telco business models each will result in.
With Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), telcos can move workloads and applications closer to customers, potentially enhancing experiences and enabling a plethora of new use cases. But with competition looming from other players, telcos need to start commercialising MEC. We have identified and modelled five viable telco business models.
STL Partners has compiled a new quarterly-updated tracker service of commercial deployments of NFV and SDN by leading telcos worldwide, providing an Excel database accompanied by an analytical report. The first update, devoted to Europe, found operators and vendors focusing on core network virtualisation and SDN/SD-WAN have so far led the way, as timelines on more systematic transformation programmes have been extended.
Facebook set up the Telecom Infra Project in 2016 to drive open source standards in core telecoms hardware and network operations. In this report we examine the implications of this project for telcos and other industry players, and recommend how they should respond.
The big prize in enterprise managed services today is supporting industries’ digital transformation. With the growing ‘softwarisation’ of networking, this creates more impetus for vendors to compete with telcos as part of a shifting ecosystem. But does vendor software risk cannibalising the telco network?
MEC (Mobile / Multi-Access Edge Computing) puts compute resources at the edge of telco networks. These servers can be used for distributing internal network functions – typically linked with NFV deployments – or made available to third-party developers as part of an “edge cloud” service offering. What are the realistic use cases, and can telcos monetise them?
Changing telcos’ systems from a legacy to a virtualised model is a bit like building an autonomous car from a moving steam locomotive. In this report, we look at the relationship between NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and OSS (Operations Support Systems), and the difficulties that operators and the developer community are facing in migrating from legacy OSS to NFV-based methods for delivering and managing communications services.