According to a recent piece on SDxCentral, “Operators don’t want the TM Forum to get lost in NFV technicalities. They want the focus on making money.” That’s an interesting and insightful couple of sentences, for several reasons, and it may be a signal of a sea change in NFV. The obvious question is who’s going to chart the change.
I’ve noted in prior blogs that many of the operators believe that the NFV ISG process has gone off-track, getting bogged down in little details of implementation that are actually outside the original spec-finding mandate for the group. At the same time, the body hasn’t found the time to address critical issues in operations integration and federation, issues that could be the foundation of a real business case. That’s left these critical issues out in the cold, to be resolved (if they can be) elsewhere.
One logical place to resolve them is the TM Forum, the body charged with operations standards. The article in SDxCentral is about the TMF, and specifically about the “Zero-touch Operations and Orchestration Management” or ZOOM project that is intended to get the TMF on board with virtual network resources and services. The acronym’s decoding is highly relevant to what the goal should be—we need operations and automation to be zero-touch and inclusive of the virtualization/orchestration processes of SDN and NFV.