A recent report by research company IDC indicates that the global market for virtual customer-premises equipment (vCPE) infrastructure will exceed $3 billion by 2021.
The report, entitled “Worldwide viper/uCPE Forecast, 2017–2021: NFV at the Network Edge” forecasts that the virtual CPE software market will grow from $145.7 million in 2016 to $2 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 68.3 percent.
At the same time, the market for virtual CPE hardware will increase from $67.8 million in 2016 to $1.16 billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 76.4%.
At Telco Systems, we believe that the growth of the market will be driven by two major trends:
- Managed network services provided by communication service providers (CSP) and over the top managed service providers (MSP)
- SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network)
The value of uCPE, as perceived by the market, is the ability to introduce NFV services in short time-to-market, innovative business offering and invest in as-you-grow-deployment models. The pace of uCPE market adoption and the value to service providers relies on:
- True open and multi-vendor solution based on a pure play NFVi-OS (network functions virtualization infrastructure operating system) solutions that fulfil the promise of NF (network functions) and hardware decoupling
- Availability of cost-effective end-to-end solutions that allow introducing and experimenting the business value of NFV services without significant pre-investment
- Right VNF (virtual network function) business models
Telco Systems offers true open, plug and play uCPE solutions that allow service providers to deploy NFV services in short time-to-market supporting all leading SD-WAN, security and other network services in multi-vendor VNF service.
The NFVTime operating system turns any Intel x86 Or ARM based commercial off the shelf white box into a carrier class uCPE.
IDC said that the most significant driver of NFV at the network edge – virtual CPE – over the next five years will be digital transformation (DX) in which enterprises deploy 3rd Platform technologies. This includes cloud, big data and analytics, mobility, and social business.
IDC concluded that there is a broader acceptance, and adoption, of software-defined networking (SDN) throughout the enterprise. As virtualization, cloud management, and SDN continue to gain traction throughout enterprise networks, virtual CPE will benefit from this paradigm shift and receive increasing consideration. It also helps that virtual CPE also promises enterprises a strong return on investment (ROI).
Additional resources
To read more on NFVTime open uCPE solution click here
To download the white paper on NFVTime-OS click here