While NFV is still in its early days, it's clear that a number of use cases like virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) are emerging this year. Service providers are looking at vCPE as a way to deliver and potentially automate new enterprise and business services, for example.
In the vendor community, suppliers will be able to gain new revenue from the adoption of virtualized network functions (VNFs), with the related components for management and orchestration (MANO) and NFV Infrastructure (NFVI). Besides vCPE, wireline and wireless operators alike are looking at NFV for other applications like wireless Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and MANO. At the same time, Dell'Oro Group said, service providers "view Carrier SDN as complementary to NFV and are increasingly evaluating the technologies together." Release