SDN, NFV and Indian Telcos

I returned with useful insights from the SDN-NFV India earlier this month. There were two discernible trends – optimistic solution vendors and cautious telcos.

Indian telcos are worried about the following:

• Indian telcos, including the largest ones, are genuinely concerned about the solidity and stability of SDN and NFV products. Telcos think that vendors do not completely appreciate the difference between a service outage suffered by Facebook and an outage suffered by a licensed cellular operator. The former can be irritating, the latter can be catastrophic.
• Indian telcos are also looking towards concrete ways of making money from SDN and NFV. What works with telcos in the US may not work with Indian telcos.

The above points were recurring themes. You could say that Indian telcos were never among the early adopters of technologies. You could also say that Indian telcos are bleeding far too heavily in the present to think rationally about overhauling their networks.

Plenty has been spoken and written about how SDN and NFV products and solutions continue to mature and grow in stature. In light of the above apprehensions, I think that the vendors have their task cut out on educating their customers in India.

Kaustubha Parkhi Principal Analyst, Insight Research

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