George Pappas is Alliance Executive at IBM and he talks to Martyn Warwick about the undoubted cost advantages that NFV, in particular, promises the industry. More than this, the use of cloud computing will bring different business models and allow telcos to move 'upstream', he says. For IBM the partnership with Juniper is important because the technology is leading both companies to a combination of cloud computing and carrier grade networking. Customers are already pushing IBM very hard to produce live implementations.