It has been three years since an Industry Specifications Group (ISG) for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV ISG) was formed under the auspices of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI NFV ISG). A lot has happened in those three years. The ISG has driven a number of POCs, and open source communities such the OPNFV formation. Industry organizations such as the TM Forum have launched major initiatives to enable NFV adoption., and service providers like AT&T have announced major programs with the goal ofimplementing NFV. In spite of all of this activity, there has been very little adoption of NFV in production networks. That raises a key question: What is causing the gap between all of the NFV-related activities and the broad adoption of NFV?

I recently published a report titled: Network Functions Virtualization: A Status Update. The report contains the results of a survey that was distributed in December 2015 and January 2016. I gave 144 survey respondents a set of 20 possible inhibitors and asked them to indicate the 3 biggest inhibitors to their company’s adoption of NFV. The top 5 responses and the percentage of the survey respondents who indicated that response are shown in following figure.

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