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.