Technavio’s market research analysts predict the global network function virtualization (NFV) market to grow rapidly at a CAGR close to 33% by 2020.
According to the market research firm, the increasing adoption of internet-connected devices will provide a major boost to the global NFV market. A rise in the number of connected devices will lead to the generation of large blocks of data. The growing popularity of ideas such as connected car, connected home, connected health, and smart cities has led many industries such as manufacturing, utilities, retail, automotive, and social media to use IoT for increased data transfer.
NFV can connect and manage the heterogeneous elements of IoT securely. It is adopted by telecom operators to use the power of virtualization and commercial servers, and open software to build, operate and manage these networks, said Technavio. It maintains the network resources by analyzing and managing the traffic flows throughout the network. Moreover, the deployment of VNFs in NFV platforms such as mobile core, DPI, routing, gateways, traffic management, and security provide the opportunity to customize network services for IoT, which also contribute to this market’s growth over the coming years.
“Most operators are typically outsourcing NFV to a single network equipment provider (NEP), but doing this means following the same vendor equipment lock-in path that operators have always taken, with limited flexibility and opportunity for competitive differentiation. Locking themselves into a big, closed environment waters down the original aims and benefits of virtualisation. Instead, operators need to invest in a selection of best-in-class software building blocks, using a number of smaller components, to make best use of the computing resources available to them. Used in this manner, NFV can empower operators to evolve their networks and services at their own pace, ahead-of and in response to local competition," said Chris Haddock, Head of Marketing at OpenCloud
Technavio analysts also highlighted that one of the recent trends gaining significant traction in the market is the increasing adoption of NFV by enterprises. Initially, telecom operators were the dominant adopters of NFV, but the market for NFV is expected to move towards enterprise cloud and internet service providers over the coming years. Private cloud is also one of the proposed areas for NFV deployment. For the private cloud to be more agile, network services have to be provisioned on-demand through NFV. With increased innovations towards identifying the cost effective and efficient NFV solutions for enterprise data center environment, these deployment models in the cloud will boost this market’s growth during the forecast period.
