There are three stages of where Operators are at the moment with regards to NFV deployment: Aware, Experimenting and Executing. There are also three different types of use cases which Dor Skuler, VP & GM Cloud Business Unit, Alcatel-Lucent, is seeing at present; roughly grouped as easy (load balancers, firewalls, DNS, DNA, DHCP), medium (control plane applications, CDN) and hard (virtual EPC, data plane applications, virtual gateways, routing functions).

The main reason Operators are deploying those ‘easy’ NFV applications first is, in his opinion, more to do with the massive internal and organizational changes that need to take place in order for Operators to deliver on the promise of NFV. Speaking with TelecomTV’s Martyn Warwick from Broadband World Forum Europe 2013, he also reveals what he, as Alcatel-Lucent’s ‘CloudBand man’ is working on at present; namely automation and optimization.