Don Clarke on NFV five years on

Martyn asks Don about elapsed time and NFV. Has it taken too long?  What people sometimes don’t understand, Don reflects, is the sheer scale of the change and investment telcos will need to take to perform the SDNFV transformation. Tens of thousands of endpoints and hundreds of nodes have to be engineered. So it not only takes a long time to do, it takes a long time to be sure you’ve got it all right...  it’s not like Google adding a few servers to its data centre, he says.

So what obstacles must be overcome now?  Customers have to become used to programmability, Don says. Sometime they hold back.

What’s been the biggest surprise? The diversity of people that are now involved. 

What will we talk about in another five years? We won’t mention SDNFV - that will all be taken for granted. We’ll talk about networks that are adaptable and programmable. 

 Filmed at: SDN NFV World Congress 2017, The Hague, Netherlands