NEC/Netcracker Lead ETSI NFV License Management Standardization Milestone

First ETSI NFV Report Paves the Way for Automating NFV License Management Across Multiple VNF Vendors

NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology Corporation announced its leading role in the creation of the first report on NFV license management by the European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI). The workgroup has come to an agreement on the required NFV architectural framework features needed to support automated NFV license management across multiple vendors.

As network functions become virtualized, the role of license management changes. New licensing schemes, such as 'pay as you use,' are now growing in popularity over traditional perpetual licensing models. Similarly, NFV will enable automated scaling of VNF software.

Today's challenges are brought about by the many diverse license management schemes that exist across service providers and VNF vendors. This makes license provisioning and management complex and time consuming which can lead to critical service outages.

Recognizing this problem, ETSI NFV and TM Forum have set up complementary specification efforts, both led by NEC/Netcracker, which will lead to a standard architecture approach for license management, enabling end-to-end license management automation.

With the first ETSI NFV License Management report now complete, the organization is working to define the features and APIs required for automating the VNF license lifecycle for services with multivendor VNFs.

"Standardizing interoperable mechanisms for NFV license management simplifies the process of onboarding multivendor VNFs with diverse commercial licensing agreements," said Don Clarke, Principal Architect for Network Technologies at CableLabs and Chair of the ETSI NFV Network Operator Council. "The VNF license management effort is an important step in reaching our goal of an open NFV ecosystem."

"Aligning around a common standard is challenging but critical for our industry to progress in NFV," said Aloke Tusnial, CTO SDN/NFV at NEC/Netcracker. "NEC/Netcracker understood early on the importance of this initiative and we are thankful for the strong collaboration between service providers and vendors in making this first milestone happen."