Cloudify Program Cuts Risk to VNF Providers With Consumption-Based Revenue Model for Cloud-Native VNF Development

NEW YORK--December 12, 2016--A new program launched by the Cloudify team at GigaSpaces this week reduces the financial and technical risks faced by VNF vendors looking to cash in on the rising tide of telecoms and large network operators making the move to cloud-native NFV architectures. Rather than taking on the fixed costs of re-architecting their VNFs for cloud-native deployments, VNF vendors can now tie the expense of this transition to the success and scaling of commercial, revenue-generating production deployments. As a result, up-front fees for re-architecting a VNF can fall by as much as an order of magnitude under the Cloudify Cloud-Native VNF Program offered by GigaSpaces. The Cloudify Cloud-Native VNF Program is the first to give VNF vendors a consumption-based model for moving their VNFs to cloud-native architectures, minimizing the upfront cost and associated risk of making the switch. In turn this gives VNF vendors greater leeway and time to build workable, long-term business models for their cloud-native VNFs, iterating rapidly until a sustainable model is found. The Opportunity VNF vendors are transforming to cloud-native VNFs to better leverage the economies and agility of the cloud, creating products that operators of large networks are increasingly demanding. VNF orchestration plays a key role in this transition, allowing automated provisioning, configuration and management. Cloudify—and the lightweight ARIA libraries leveraging the Cloudify engine—is an open-source orchestration environment already in use by many telecoms and large network operators for VNF management. Cloudify uses the Topology for Orchestration and Specification for Cloud Applications—or TOSCA—standard, widely embraced by telecoms. “Most VNFs are packaged today as a virtual appliance and were not designed for cloud-native architectures,” said Nati Shalom, founder and CTO of GigaSpaces. “They were not built for scale-out, and they’re not driven by APIs, nor do they support multi-tenancy. Most require manual intervention to set up. Cloud-native environments need all these, and that’s what the Cloud-Native VNF Program provides, in a model that virtually eliminates business risk by scaling fee to production revenue.” Cloud-Native VNF Program Tiered Pricing Model The business risk and cost associated with transitioning VNFs to a cloud-native architecture hold many VNF providers back from making the leap. Cloudify simplifies the process by providing a generic orchestration capability that removes much of the complexity associated with deployment, provisioning and remediation. The tiered pricing model of the Cloudify Cloud-Native VNF Program reduces risk by tying transition costs to the eventual scale-up of production operations with customers. There are three phases in the model: 1. Design Phase—A low-cost model allows users to quickly assess how the VNF can be redesigned for a cloud-native environment. 2. Development Phase—A per-seat SLA for developer support is offered at this phase, when service developers need help determining which fee-based services they can build atop a given VNF or set of VNFs. 3. Production Phase—Once design and development are complete, GigaSpaces offers back-to-back support, with the VNF providers delivering front-end support and GigaSpaces offering backend technical support. At this point, GigaSpaces can offer the pricing model that best fits the customer’s business model: revenue sharing, fixed price or tiered. By breaking the process into three phases, the model reduces risk for customers, allowing them to isolate design and development activities into separate contract tiers, before commercial applicability is assessed. GigaSpaces offers discounts for volume work and for up-front payment of design and development phases. In addition to the paid program, VNF providers can take advantage of basic resources offered by the Cloudify community, including cloud-native VNF transition training and the fully open source, self-supported version of the orchestration software. “Building a cloud-native VNF should be a no-brainer,” said Shalom. “We’re bringing a commercial mindset to the migration of networking topologies from fixed and proprietary to cloud-native and open source. This model eliminates all of the barriers that hold VNF providers back from moving to cloud-native architectures. Tying pricing to the amount of value that VNF providers extract at each stage of the transition controls the costs associated with the transition, delivering that ‘no-brainer’ model everyone is looking for.” Cloud-Native VNF Partners Versa Networks and Athonet are two leading VNF providers working with GigaSpaces via the Cloud-Native VNF Program to deliver cloud-native functionality. They have integrated Cloudify with multiple VNFs in their portfolio to meet the diverse use cases that telecoms require, and are supporting GigaSpaces in the launch of the onboarding program. Resources

• BLOG: Where AT&T Leads, Cisco Can't Follow
• WHITE PAPER: From VNF to Cloud Native VNF: Requirements for a Cloud Native Network Function
• FREE ONLINE LAB: NFV Lab On-Demand

More at www.gigaspaces.com and www.getcloudify.org.