Hewlett-Packard is looking to help telecommunications vendors leverage network-function virtualization (NVF) technology as they advance into the new era of IT. The end goal is to help tlecos respond more quickly to changing demands, more rapidly spin out services for end users, and better compete against more agile competitors like Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Leading these efforts is Bethany Mayer, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP NFV. Mayer recently appeared on theCUBE at this year’s HP Discover Las Vegas 2014 event alongside hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, where she discussed her new group’s plans to carve out a piece of territory in this emerging field.

Trouble brewing for Telcos

According to Mayer, Telcos are facing a big problem – they’re under threat from companies like Google and AWS because they’re still using old technology in their infrastructure, and that’s causing a slow roll-out of services.

“Things have changed, the telcos have new competitors,” Mayer said. “AWS and Google and threatening competitors, and so telcos have to provide new services to compete. This is the difference between them making money and losing money. Even with their cellular services, telcos are not making the money they did in the past.”

NVF is the ideal solution to this, says Mayer. Comprising compute, storage and networking, NVF can be thought of as a kind of “SDN for telcos” that solves their infrastructure problems by virtualizing the core so they can create services based on this virtualized platform.

HP isn’t the only company pushing NFV. Red Hat and Alcatel are among the companies that have also expressed interest in beefing up the NFV ecosystem, trying to rally vendors around the cause of making the technology happen more quickly for carriers.

A paradigm shift?

Even so, HP is definitely at the forefront of this emerging field. It’s working very closely with telcos to come up with the kinds of solutions they need. It recently announced the creation of its OpenNFV Program, a collection of software and services designed to enable communications service providers to virtualize much of their core networking environment and put their network functions into software. Mayer told Furrier that HP was looking to strengthen this architecture by partnering with networking equipment providers like Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, Siemens and Brocade, with the end goal being to create solutions and sell these to network service providers.

“We have a great offering in terms of the architecture,” said Mayer. “It includes the converged infrastructure as the baseline for the infrastructure itself. In fact, converged systems is gonna play a part here it too. It includes our OpenStack capabilities. One of the real, strong value proposition HP offers is our OpenStack cloud orchestration capability it’s something that no one else in the industry has right now and something that we can offer immediately, along with our our expertise.”

Mayer also spoke of HP’s long-standing relationship with telcos, and how this should cement the company’s leadership in NFV.

“We’re an open standards company, we’re heterogeneous, and we also have a very large business with telcos,” she insisted. “So they trust us in many of the things they’re doing. And they recognize we can change the paradigm for them, and with them.”

Furrier said that with this effort HP is essentially getting into the consumerization of IT, and wondered just how far up the stack does it reach with this initiative. According to Mayer, HP is offering telcos and end-to-end solution, including infrastructure, cloud, orchestration, end point devices and more.

“We can provide an end point solution for them that utilizes a new infrastructure that’s fully virtualized, agile, cloud orientated, that’s basically ready for them to compete with the Google’s and AWS’s,” boasted Mayer. “We also have end user devices that we can bring to the customer to take advantage of, to sell new services on. Our end to end offering is completely different from anyone else.”

So can this NFV push help HP to offset the falling from its traditional hardware businesses? Obviously this isn’t the only new path HP is following, but according to Mayer it could be a very fruitful one.

“We’ve sized the market in the tens of billions of dollars,” said Mayer. “Right now the sizing we’ve seen is on the order of $24 billion over the next four years – it’s a big, big opportunity.”

And not just for HP. The telcos too, can expect to make a lot of money from revamping their IT infrastructures according to HP’s vision.

“They can change the trajectory of their businesses because right now many of their businesses are decreasing in revenue and increasing in cost,” claimed Mayer. “We’re going to help them compete with some of the folks who’re in their face, like Google and AWS.”

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