MetraTech,
the leading provider of Agreements-Based Billing, commerce and
settlement solutions, today announced that the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) approved a proof of
concept to investigate operational efficiency in network functions
virtualization (NFV) capacity planning, provisioning and billing.
Results of this initiative, submitted jointly with BT and Huawei, will
be published mid-December 2014. MetraTech’s metadata-driven MetraNet®
billing and settlement platform can support new NFV services and
business models, as well as services in legacy silos.
In 2012, seven of the world’s leading telecoms network operators – AT&T,
BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Verizon –
initiated a new standards group for virtualization of network functions.
NFV was driven by operators with a common goal of moving away from
proprietary elements to virtualized functions running on commodity
hardware. Evidence of the interest to drive NFV to reality has been seen
through the growth of the working group since its inception. Nineteen
months later, there are now 58 global carriers and more than 200
companies participating in seven working groups defining the
requirements for all aspects of the virtualized network and its
orchestration and management. NFV will empower carriers to build and
configure networks more flexibly and rapidly. This will diminish the
time to market associated with provisioning and scaling new services,
and result in cost reduction, flexibility and superior management.
Esmeralda Swartz, MetraTech’s chief marketing officer, said, “NFV
is a transformative technology for service provider networks. While
others focus on the technical changes required to achieve NFV, our proof
of concept looks at the business processes necessary to optimize the use
of NFV. Because of our metadata-driven architecture, we are ready to
bill and settle NFV services accurately and efficiently.”
Gartner reports, the holistic control of SDN with the elasticity of NFV
gives CSPs (communication service providers) new and more flexible
business models, but they will also need new support systems.
Gartner believes that the year 2017 will be the inflection point that
rapidly increases the SDN and NFV solutions adoption within the CSP
environment. Gartner forecasts CSP capex for SDN and NFV of more than
$11.5 billion worldwide by 2017.
MetraTech’s NFV-ready
MetraNet platform enables the efficient operation that is key to
achieving the benefits of the virtualized network, which requires
comprehensive interfaces between the operator’s business policies and
the network orchestrator. MetraNet facilitates the flexible
configuration of the data model, transaction processing and user
interface through Web services-compliant APIs. As a result, MetraNet
conforms to a customer’s business model and existing systems, rather
than the other way around. Users can easily create new services or
leverage services in legacy silos.
MetraNet’s metadata-driven APIs and data model will support the customer
entitlement, service-level performance requirements and pricing
parameters for the static and elastic aspects of NFV, providing for the
accurate allocation of virtualized resources. MetraTech will receive the
real-time performance metrics needed to calculate customer prices and
settlements due to vendors providing the services. The findings from the
proof of concept directly support the planning efforts of the NFV
industry specification working groups and will be incorporated into the
final work product of the groups.