Seven out of 10 operators are planning to virtualise some or all of their messaging services over the next four years, a new report has found.
Research by Heavy Reading, conducted for vendor Xura, revealed that SMS was the most popular messaging service to be migrated this year (27 percent), followed by spam and fraud messaging control (22 percent) and IP messaging (21 percent).
David Spann, VP Technology and Architecture at Xura, said: “Interestingly, those services like MMS that have probably taken the biggest hit from Over-The-Top (OTT) applications seem to be furthest down the priority list, with nearly a third (31 percent) saying they had no plans to virtualise this service as yet.”
However, respondents were concerned about a wide range of challenges, notably product interworking, orchestration and the complexity of migration.
Among the other problems operators cited with virtualisation was changing the culture within their company and defining business cases.
Spann added: “When you consider the impact on an organisation’s culture that virtualisation and the move to NFV will have, part of the issue will be with who has responsibility for the service implementation and delivery. Will it be the network team, the value added services team or the IT department? Who manages the budget, the platform and the team that will have responsibility for running it on a day to day basis?”
Other findings of the report included how operators were split between using the OpenStack and VMare frameworks.
Jim Hodges, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading, commented: “What makes this level of commitment [to virtualisation] so profound is that it is driven by a broad range of technical and business drivers. For example, on the technical side, CSPs [communication service providers] cite operational efficiency followed by network scale and elasticity as the top two drivers, while on the business side CSPs are moving messaging solutions into the cloud to achieve not only service agility and flexibility, but also hardware related opex reduction and capex reduction.”