A month and a half ago, Dialogic and Oracle executed a successful NFV MANO demonstration during SDXCentral Demo Friday. We also did an enhanced version of this demo at this past Mobile World Congress.

NFV is a great concept, but in order to pull it off, an ecosystem will need to be humming along.  There are quite a few challenges to NFV, including operational ones, business ones, and technical ones such as scalability and interoperability.  Dialogic is working hard on the scalability ones (at least for our software based products) and on interoperability.  Interoperability success pivots on having either really good open based standards, or someone creating a de facto standard.  From what I’ve seen, some of the early NFV entrants tried to create de facto standards.  It’s obvious why they tried to do it, but I think that ship has sailed and the greater industry won’t fall for that anymore.

The specific demo that we did on the Demo Friday was to show multimedia voice and video services in an IMS environment.  We used the Dialogic software-based Media Resource Function (media server) and the Dialogic Media Resource Broker, which provides scalability and high availability for the MRF, as actual VNFs for this demo.  We also used the Oracle Application Server and the Oracle IMS Core, which are also VNFs, and the Oracle VNF Manager.  So it was a complete IMS core application demonstration.  (By the way, in this environment, the Dialogic MGCF and Gateways can be used to connect to the PSTN network, but these are not VNFs at this time).

The demo is impressive and I invite you to watch it here.  This is one of many steps towards a true NFV implementation in the field, running someone’s network.  This will happen, and it will happen more swiftly than many of you think.  Be on the lookout.