Is 2015 going to be the year of NFV deployments?  What are the key hurdles to NFV the industry is working on?  What aspects of the network are the first to be virtualized?  What about partnering across the ecosystem – how is that working and what can be done to enhance it?  Ask your questions and hear what executives from Brocade, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, and Sprint have to say about the network transformation.  This panel will be the first of many lively discussions at the IDF Intel Network Builder summit.

Mobile Data Traffic continues to grow and shows no signs of abating. IoT and M2M are driving up mobile control traffic and tablets, smartphones and laptops are increasing bearer load. The increase in traffic is especially prevalent in-building and in urban areas with 70% of mobile traffic has moved indoors. Small Cell were seen as the savior for helping meet this challenge, but have fallen short of projections due to the high cost and scale of deployment challenge. Parallel to the coverage challenge, the enterprise business community is clamoring for a richer structure to serve the mobile user.

The panel will get the discussion going on how the Mobile Edge Computing platform can facilitate introduction of new edge services to the Enterprise client. You will first be exposed to a discussion about the Small Cell/MEC platform. The panelists  will discuss early examples and ideas that leverage the compute power at the edge. Finally, ISVs and service providers can then use their imagination and client Use Cases to introduce other services that improve client experience, optimize the network and new billable services.

Today's orchestration solutions are rapidly evolving to provide services for virtualized entities but are stymied by weak and nascent standards for NFV-O and MANO. Proprietary, vertically integrated orchestration solutions can place constraints on the interoperability within a large ecosystem of virtual network functions as well as the efficient placement of workloads, potentially putting the promise of SDN and NFV at risk. 

In this panel, our guests will discuss key issues facing orchestration providers, including

• Standardization efforts for descriptors and information models
• Intelligent workload placement options on IA
• Operator priorities for NFV-O and MANO in 2016

This panel will focus on the trends of SDN and NFV in the Enterprise. In addition, tehre will be a discussion around real usage models for both SDN and NFV within both Enterprise and Cloud environments.

Service providers are facing new challenges as they make the transition to NFV. In this session, our panelists will discuss how they're working with network operators to address key barriers to NFV adoption, including quantifying the business case, the need for carrier-grade solutions, integration with OSS/BSS, and interworking between Network and IT organizations.

The network transformation is not only changing the architecture of the network, but also changing the ecosystem value chain - no longer are service providers and enterprises working with single appliance vendors, but they are now needing to engage with hardware companies, multiple software companies, as well as a system integrator to pull it all together. This panel will discuss the key value add components that must coalesce to make NFV and the network transformation a reality. 

SDN and NFV hold great promise for cost reduction and operational efficiency in carrier networks. However, these technologies also pose risks and challenges when applied to complex carrier networks. This presentation will discuss the expected benefits to be achieved and the issues that must be solved before SDN and NFV can be fully embraced and implemented in the high-reliability networks operated by carriers.