By Christopher Cullan, Product Marketing Manager, Business Services Solutions, Infovista
The winds of change have overtaken the telecommunications industry. First of all, the global Carrier Ethernet market is booming, and many experts are predicting that it will continue growing to become a $50 billion industry by 2017. Secondly, software-defined networking (SDN) recently became one of the hottest buzzwords in our industry and we are already seeing it present new opportunities and challenges for communications service providers (CSPs) to address.
In light of these new trends, the Metro Ethernet Forum is hosting the Service Operations Summit tomorrow in Montreal, which I am thrilled to be attending. Bringing together speakers from some of the most innovative players in the communications space, the summit will provide the opportunity to discuss prominent issues that our industry faces in scaling the deployment and automation of Ethernet services, including the impact of SDN and cloud computing. It will also showcase the MEF's new Service Operations Committee, which was formed earlier this year to help define, streamline and standardize the various processes associated with buying, selling, delivering and operating Ethernet services.
I'm further delighted to be invited to speak on the “Ethernet Operations: The Supplier's Perspective” panel to discuss and perhaps debate the readiness of existing software systems and equipment to address the challenges of Ethernet service delivery. I look forward to discussing, in particular, the value of the MEF's SOAM Performance Monitoring Implementation Agreement and its potential value to the business services customer and what we can do as an industry to achieve that value.
These topics are a huge focus for the Infovista team as a major OSS vendor and service assurance software solution provider. We are always looking ahead to the new and exciting technologies that are likely to permeate our industry in the next year. Will you be at the Service Operations Summit discussing them, too? How do you think SDN and cloud will impact Carrier Ethernet? Likewise, what do you think is missing for today's enterprise customers to reap the full benefits of Carrier Ethernet?
