Report: Pace of NFV adoption takes industry by surprise

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) may become a reality in commercial networks sooner than expected, according to a Light Reading report from this week's Management World conference in Nice, France.  NFV allows certain network functions to be hosted on generic IT platforms instead of throughout the network of proprietary hardware. The reported quoted Laurent Leboucher, Global IS & Technology chief architect at France Telecom Orange as saying that in the coming years, "global virtual network providers will emerge," with software-defined networking (SDN) technologies being used to control the network and NFV capabilities to provide the functionality. Article