This third and final report in the series follows the successful launch of parts I and II covering NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), hypervisors, Virtualized Infrastructure Managers (VIMs), and the management and orchestration (MANO) necessary to deploy VNFs (virtual network functions). Parts I and II have seen a combined download of over 3,500 copies since the publication in mid-April 2018 of the first report, with broad readership including key decision-makers from top-tier Communication Service Providers (CSPs) worldwide.

The VNF report focuses on leading VNF solutions that are purpose-built as SDx solutions and deployed on NFV infrastructure. CSPs and vendors have been working hard to build out new VNFs and enhancing existing ones while taking advantage of underlying capabilities in the NFVI and hardware where appropriate. As they move forward rapidly, new challenges have developed including the emergence of isolated VNF islands, difficulty in VNF on-boarding, and complexity in VNF workload placement. Despite these challenges, solutions like SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking)/vCPE (virtual customer premise equipment) and vRAN/c-RAN (virtual and cloud radio access networks) that can dramatically reduce the cost for an operator while giving them flexibility are gaining attention from CSPs and vendors alike.

Key trends covered in the report include VNF and VNFCs (VNF components) and their relationship to software-defined networks (SDNs) and network virtualization (NV), role of DevOps and Ci/CD, leading VNF/VNFC use cases and deployment scenarios, and VNF management platforms and architectures.

The report also includes results from a survey conducted by SDxCentral's research team with select members of the SDxCentral community. This report is complimentary and available for download at SDxCentral.com. Vendors interested in participating in future versions of this report or other reports published by SDxCentral.com can contact us at https://www.sdxcentral.com/inquiry/research/.