How will the Open Edge help your channel partners grow?

The Open Edge Alliance will help our channel grow in two ways. First, the ecosystem will provide exposure to new market segments. Specifically, the ecosystem will provide a new go-to-market channel for our channel partners selling to enterprises that want to access IT management and security services from the Cloud. This is very important for our vendor channel partners as the overall demand is moving from hardware-based products to software-based services.
Second, our ecosystem provides a framework for both our channel partners and end-user enterprises to benefit from the synergies among the vendors participating in our alliance ecosystem. An example of this is service activation can be integrated with a VoIP gateway and a firewall in order to provide higher value to the end customer compared the use of individual vendor systems separately.

How big of a role do solution providers play in the SDN/NFV market today? Will it always be that way?

We see that communications service providers are actively adding SDN and NFV to their network architectures and roadmaps. The rollout of SDN and NFV technologies are being driven actively by both the communications service providers and the solution providers in two main aspects. Both are working on standardization and joint proof-of-concepts.

How do you think businesses can shift towards SDN/NFV?

SDN NFV projects should be driven through business objectives. In other words, communications service providers should define their SDN NFV roadmaps and rollouts based on revenue generating potential first. At the same time, the risks and costs should be analyzed.  An entire network should not be replaced as the risks and costs are extremely high.

Again, the initial projects should focus on activities related to revenue generation. For example, a communications service provider should consider to start with rolling out (Infrastructure-as-a-service)-based services to generate new revenue streams instead of migrating (IP Multimedia Subsystems) platforms to NFV.

Do you see any hot solution providers/VARs startups doing big things in SDN and NFV?

Definitely, software-first solutions will have a significant advantage in design and performance over those that need to migrate existing hardware-based solutions. Startups that are software-first companies and fully cloud-based and managed will have advantages. This allows flexible functionality, pricing and rapid deployment. Our partner Netrounds is a perfect example of such a startup.

Why should SDN/NFV-focused solution providers partner with Telco Systems?

SDN and NFV focused solutions providers are attracted to our large and growing customer base of communications service providers around the world. In addition, our SDN/NFV is fully managed and carrier grade. Channel partners are expressing a lot of interest in working with us because of both of these.