We attended the Comcast Business analyst event in Philadelphia.  We find the Business Services part of Comcast is interesting, and so do customers, because it is growing rapidly.  It installs a “new Ethernet every four minutes,” and has “40-45K installs per month.”  The company shared with the audience that it is expanding the breadth of its services to grow its potential revenue it can get from each customer, and in many cases is either acquiring or developing this technology itself.  We see these development efforts as moving up the technology stack.
​
To understand Comcast Business, you have to know that it has unique approaches to its different customer segments.  The organization addresses customers of different sizes, and it does not use the same terminology as some others do: SMB (<20 employees), Mid-market (20+ employees), Enterprise (Fortune 1000).  We think it is more common that small is considered 100 employees and smaller, which would include SMB and Comcast’s Mid-Market, and that mid would be 101 employees or greater.  Here are the Comcast Business market views:

More details about customer segments.  In addition to attacking three customer size groups with distinct approaches, it also serves two verticals (carriers and government) segments with different strategies and recently acquired Deep Blue (May 2019) that serves WiFi to venues and hospitality verticals.  Each served customer type uses different combinations of third-party developed technology and Comcast in-house developed technology.  The company has 4,000 people developing in-house technology.  As a mix of total systems sold to customers, today, Comcast Business uses a higher mix of in-house developed technology when serving its small and mid-market customers than it does when serving large enterprises.  The group that serves Enterprise Solutions serves large enterprises using mostly using third-party technology from vendors like Cisco, Fortinet, and HPE.
​
On the other hand, the company serves smaller-sized customers using fully or partially in-house developed technology.  Comcast Business’s SVP Product Management, Bob Victor, summed up its approach to working with third-party vendors by saying, “We want to totally commoditize hardware.”  We assume he means this is a long-term goal because, during the event, the company told us of new hardware and software relationships announced with new vendors. 
For small and mid businesses, the company has developed several in-house technology systems that compete with vendor-supplied technology.  One such example is its WiFi Pro service, which combines internet connection and WiFi service.  In WiFi Pro, which was introduced a couple of years ago to small businesses and is available at up to four Access Points, the company sources WLAN access points from a non-branded access point.  Based on our discussions at this conference, we would not rule out that at least some of the in-house developed technology may be supplanted by vendor-supplied technology if there is a compelling reason.  However, on multiple occasions, we learned that the direction the Comcast Business is going is to develop in-house technologies and bring these directly to customers, first with smaller customers, and perhaps very long term to large enterprises.

Managed Services.  The company delivers both transport/network services and transport bundled with other services; there is a case to be made that Comcast Business’ bundled services could be called Managed Services.  However, even Comcast says there is some confusion about using the terminology “Managed Services,” because of customer expectations; some customers see it as a very high level of services, where customers do nothing, while others see it as Comcast Business is “working with” the customer to deliver the service.

Playing to Strengths.  On an overall basis, Bill Stemper, who runs Comcast Business, says the company’s strategy is to focus on serving the wireline needs of businesses in the US.  He says, “this is where we invest.  We expect to focus this way for decades.” 

Small Business details.  Stemper said that the company would bring “mobile to small business.”  It will bring mobile to this segment when “all the systems are squared away, and when sales reps are capable of selling this additional service without slowing down customer purchasing decisions on the existing suite of services.”  It is currently offering mobile in selected markets to learn more about selling this new service.  We expect mobile to small business to be offered sometime in 2020.

Growth Avenues in Mid-Market.  The company made it clear that it believes the mid-market is an enormous growth opportunity.  And, starting in 2020 and beyond, the company says, it is putting more investment into it to improve coverage, its focus, and its reach.  Today, the company has 800 reps targeting the in mid-market and plays to strengths in certain verticals such as government, education, and healthcare.  

Large Enterprise Opportunities.  Approaching the Fortune 1000, the company has its most meaningful exposure in finance, healthcare, restaurants, retail, hospitality verticals.  The company is finding customers who, according to Comcast, are replacing MPLS service with broadband and getting a 50% cost reduction and an order of magnitude speed improvement.  Comcast introduced a leader from a large finance company to the audience, and though we cannot name the customer, the company shared that it had moved initially to use Comcast transport, and is currently doing a proof of concept for voice and Comcast’s ActiveCore SD-WAN service.  Comcast reiterated its plans to use Cisco, Fortinet, and HPE at large enterprise (Fortune 1000), though implied it is entering another phase that it internally calls Enterprise 2.0 for its Enterprise Solutions group.  In Enterprise 2.0, the company hinted it might develop more in-house technology and further implied its ActiveCore (SD-WAN is one service it offers in ActiveCore) might find a home in some large enterprises.  Comcast’s customer endorsed the idea of using white box universal CPE loaded with “best of breed services” instead of buying vendor-supplied routers so it will not have to replace 15,000 routers when it comes to upgrading time or transitioning. 

Carrier opportunity.  Bill Stemper, who leads Comcast Business explained that, since 2009, it has served carrier Ethernet to the mobile industry and it will pursue 5G opportunistically.  Elaborating further, Stemper said it would decide whether we can get leverage on new builds to serve 5G simultaneously with other customer types.  So, it sounds like building new plant to serve only 5G backhaul is not in the cards. 

Deep Blue WLAN.  In May 2019, the company acquired a Troy, NY-based WiFi services company.  We understand from the presentations that Deep Blue was growing at least 30%/year for several years before the acquisition and that its revenues may have hit around $40M.  The company designs/installs third-party WLAN and associated systems, then operates the networks for a recurring fee mainly in verticals such hospitality and large venues.  The wholly-owned subsidiary has developed advanced software and services capabilities that could easily be leveraged across the other parts of Comcast Business, but from what we learned, there has been no cross-fertilization as of yet.

Products.  The company is expanding the number of services it can deliver to customers, thereby increasing its possible revenues to each customer.  It began offering SD-WAN services three years ago.  It plans to expand beyond SD-WAN.  In its mid-market customer focus, the company will soon offer security (Advanced Firewall and UTM, for instance), routing, and a bit later on, voice gateway (SBC) and WiFi.  For premises-based VNFs, these are run on a universal CPE (uCPE) that today costs about $1,000 to Comcast and it will be launching a $500 uCPE with similar capabilities soon.  The company is updating the cable plant that serves business users, where 4 M businesses are passed, towards a “mid split” architecture that allows for greater upstream speeds so that initially 50 Mbps up and down will be possible, and then over time 100/100, 300/300 and longer-term 1 Gbps up and down.  The company also uses EPON for more demanding needs and places like multiple dwelling units; it won’t be moving to XG PON (10 Gbps) for the foreseeable future.

The company has a multi-vendor approach with these VNFs.  This week, it announced Fortinet UTM/security.  We expect the company could announce other security, routing and perhaps longer-term, other SD-WAN vendor options.  We think the company will stick with a single WiFi cloud controller for at least the next year or so, but indicated it could introduce at least one more vendor’s technology afterward.  The $500 uCPE device is capable of 1 Gbps SD-WAN throughput, as well as advanced firewall at 1 Gbps and has UTM at 600 Mbps. These are impressive throughput numbers, we think, especially because similar throughput capabilities are available on proprietary boxes from vendors that cost much more.

Additionally, the product called CBR2, a new version of its Comcast business router, will be coming soon.  Both the original CBR and CBR2 have WLAN as a built-in feature.  But, neither the CBR nor the CBR2 has sufficient WLAN coverage capabilities to satisfy a mid-sized business, so Comcast thinks its soon-to-be-launched WLAN plans to mid-sized businesses allow it to serve more customers.  One such new target from these added WLAN capabilities will be the E-Rate program, which is a partial funding mechanism for K-12 schools overseen by the US FCC, is one such target.


Comcast emphasized that it has spent significant time and resources developing software capabilities that allow it to orchestrate VNFs, to remotely administer customer networks, and to allow multiple VNFs from different vendors, or to allow VNFs that are developedin-house by its customers.
 

We attended the Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 event held in San Francisco today. Representatives from partner companies who attended included HPE Aruba, Cisco, Commscope, Boingo, Netgear, Rivet Networks, AMD, and Microsoft. The principal announcement at the event was that Qualcomm announced its Networking Pro Series Platforms which are focused on Wi-Fi 6 capabilities, semiconductor systems which are in initial stages of availability and expected to be available on systems in coming months and quarters. The new Networking Pro Series chip systems hit four price points generally segmented by the number of antennas (more at the higher end) and are primarily targeted to the enterprise market, though we learned that some of the high-end consumer ("prosumer") vendors plan to use these chips as well. The new Networking Pro products have unique features compared to previous Wi-Fi 6 chips introduced from Qualcomm, including upstream MU-MIMO and upstream OFDMA and the design claim is that these can support 1,500 simultaneous users both upstream and downstream.

In the past, it could be said that Wi-Fi and cellular compete in some markets. We found it interesting that Qualcomm said that it expects that Wi-Fi 6 mesh products will be the way to get 5G millimeter-wave signals indoors. Several Qualcomm executives echoed the message that Wi-Fi and cellular are complementary, even though many Qualcomm service provider and cellular equipment partners do not subscribe to this point of view.

Qualcomm shared some impressive numbers. It ships approximately 1B Wi-Fi device chips per year at a run-rate; it has shipped over 4B Wi-Fi chips since 2015; and by comparison, had shipped 1/2B chips by 2010. It has shipped Wi-Fi chips with MU-MIMO capabilities to a total of 0.75B client devices. Qualcomm claims it has found that Target Wait Time (TWT) can improve cell phone battery life by as much as 60%.

HPE Aruba President, Keerti Melkote, presented and shared with the audience that it had won the Wi-Fi project to the nearby Chase Center, where the NBA's Warriors play and that it should operating soon. Additionally, Melkote emphasized that Aruba had recently begun shipping its price-competitive Instant ON product and the take-up has been strong. Cisco SVP Engineering, Anand Oswal, primarily discussed Cisco's Open Roaming initiative that focuses on seamless and secure public Wi-Fi onboarding. It was interesting that Cisco did not focus its comments on Wi-Fi 6. Morgan Kurk, CTO Commscope and acting President of Ruckus Networks spoke about the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 to venues, primary and secondary educational institutions, including AR & VR, 1:1 and online assessment use cases. Derek Peterson, CTO Boingo, a Wi-Fi/cellular venue services provider shared that it is now serving 1B consumers per year. Its goal is to get 100 MHz to each user, and that it will reach this goal by using all available spectrum, licensed and unlicensed. Peterson also shared its observations of the benefits from using Wi-Fi 6 at its trial that began in April of 2019 at the John Wayne Airport in Irvine, CA. Morgan Teachworth, Head of Hardware Platforms of Cisco Meraki, shared observations of several events it has been involved with, including the US Open Pebble Beach 2019 event, where, to its surprise, upload traffic exceeded downlink traffic. David Henry, SVP Connected Home Products from Netgear, hinted that it plans to introduce its Wi-Fi 6 mesh product, saying wait for details next week. We also learned that Netgear would leverage the highest end Qualcomm Network Pro chips intended for enterprise-class devices. 

VK Jones, VP of Technology, Qualcomm Atheros, spoke about future products and standards work. He said by 2020, we should expect 6 GHz, and, by 2022, 802.11ax Release 2 features including scheduling and spatial re-use to improve old device capabilities. 6 GHz requires a third-party service provider to coordinate what frequencies each access point uses.

Mid-band spectrum shortages in the US was the main thrust of the 5G Americas sponsors. The idea is that the rest of the world has lots of mid-band spectrum available and service providers in countries that could be considered economic leaders (Japan, Korea, China, Western European countries) have plenty of available mid-band spectrum that is ideal for 5G, while the US does not.  This group at 5G Americas, which includes service providers, vendors and standards bodies, is saying that US leadership in cellular infrastructure and the entire app economy that relies upon it may be at risk as 5G get deployed.

Other topics discussed:  AT&T is currently out for bid on its 5GC infrastructure, and this caused some interesting posturing by the vendor attendees (like Ericsson, Nokia, Cisco, Mavenir) at this conference, with each trying to identifying their strengths.  It seems the consensus is that all mobile operators in the US market are using Option 3X, an EPC anchoring system.  And, the consensus seems to be that US operators will need to move to 5GC once most traffic is coming over 5G Radio (“New Radio”).  Vendor selection appears an open field, once again, as 5GC has 13 different microservices, each which could theoretically be parsed out to different vendors.  Operators are saying, though, that while this multi-vendor selection may lead to savings on purchasing, it will increase integration spending, so these two have to be balanced out. 

Mobile Edge Computing:  The consensus is that a 50 mile radius (or others are saying 100 km) is considered the ‘edge,’ or the ‘low latency’ zone.  We expect, however, that the data forwarding plane (‘user plane’) will be distributed to, say, 100 locations within a territory like the US market, while the control plane will be much more centralized (perhaps as centralized as it is currently, where it might be considered to be like 1/4th the number of locations). 
​
CBRS.  The consensus is that testing will be done by mid November 2018 and Initial Commercial Deployment by 1Q19, potentially spilling into 2Q19.  PAL auctions are expected by attendees to be a 2019 event, with 2020 traffic running on PAL spectrum. Commscope represented the views from a SAS standpoint for this discussion.There were discussions about the C-Band (6 Ghz) potentially using the same type of Automatic Frequency Coordination system, but the consensus is that it is too early to declare that the path forward.

We attended Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) in Los Angeles, CA this week, as well as the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco.  Since 5G is launching first the US, these two events became the public events where significant 5G-related announcements happened.

• Verizon.  Will launch 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on October 1 in four markets: Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.
• AT&T.  The company reiterated its own 5G plans (mobile 5G by year-end 2018 in cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Waco, Houston, Jacksonville, Lousville, New Orleans and San Antonia), plus it made some announcements like that it is beginning 5G-ready CBRS equipment testing (using Samsung CBRS equipment and CommScope as SAS provider).  Also, at the Spark event on Monday, the company announced three strategic telecom equipment suppliers, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung. 
• T-Mobile.  Announced that it had completed a Cisco vEPC system (upgradeable to 5G Core) carrying traffic for 70M users that was from Cisco.  It also announced that it signed a $3.5B 5G agreement with Ericsson.  This is in addition to the July 30 announcement made earlier with Nokia for $3.5B, as well.  Generally, the company has set expectations as recently as September 10 that it will provide nationwide 5G by the year 2020.
• Sprint.  Announced that it had demonstrated a 5G NR connection of Massive MIMO with Nokia equipment.

Additionally, discussions about spectrum in the US market were very active discussions.  Some points we picked up on:

• No new mid-band auctions will occur in the US market for another 2-3 years, so this means that new capacity is going to come from LAA (just announced on the iPhone Xs this week, as well) and from CBRS (discussed above).
• The "who has the fastest 5G throughput" battle will be won at the millimeter wave.  In other words, using millimeter was, speeds as high as 10 Gbps are possible, but with mid-band (1-6 Ghz), where LTE is currently deployed, cannot go much over 2 Gbps.  So, to beat the Ookla Speed Test, the mobile operators who deploy mmWave early will get a leg up.  However, in order to deploy mmWave, these have to be small-cells that are within 100 meters of users.  Since it is so difficult to get real-estate rights and backhaul for small cells, this is going to be a big challenge.  Nevertheless, this is how the battle will be won.
• T-Mobile's 600 Mhz rollout is now in 1,250 cities.  The company will eventually enable 600 Mhz 5G.  600 Mhz should dramatically improve T-Mobile coverage because it is low-band spectrum.

Not quite a year ago, Cisco and Google announced a Cloud partnership. Today, at the very first keynote at Cisco Live 2018, Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud joined Chuck Robbins on stage to talk about the partnership, highlighting Kubernetes and a  unified security policy.   Both Chuck and Diane want a large ecosystem of partners and developers.  Later on, Chuck mentioned Cisco passing the 500K developer milestone for DEVNET.

Chuck touched a litter on routing, mentioning next-generation branch and highlighting intent based networking activity in the SP space.  For example, one of their SP customers updates 60,000 routers each night using automation. He then quickly got back to the Catalyst 9K switch, highlighted as the fastest ramping product ever in Cisco history.
 
Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles was highlighted as a customer of the Cat 9K. As a customer, they have over 35,000 connected devices.  They purchased over 2,000 WLAN APs and over 200 Cat 9300 switches. They are also deploying ISE and have done over 23,000 different device profiles/identifications and are track to start policy enforcement.  They are now in the process of deploying at their branch locations. They noted 550k blocked threats over the first few months of deployment.
 
My key takeaways are that there is an explosion of devices and data on the network, much of which is encrypted and a human can only do so much; thus the network must scale and automate.  Cisco is looking to use AI, automation, and its architecture to allow the customer to scale with those IoT devices and to have the network automate many tasks, especially around security. Monetization for Cisco will occur both in the hardware, but also in the solution sale.  An ideal customer would be end-to-end Cisco, but Cisco will also support open APIs in order to allow partners and customers to operate with their preferred solutions.

Keynotes at the NFV World & Zero-Touch Congress in San Jose, California were very interesting today.  We share our observations and view of the main themes from these interesting presentations by Nokia, NEC/Netcracker, Google, CenturyTel.  The main theme of these presentations, we think, is this:  NFV/SDN is now deeply in the deployment and commercial phase, where compared to 3-4 years ago, it was just a concept.  

Nokia.  The company announced that its Airframe server platform, which is an OCP based design, comes available with either embedded acceleration or pluggable acceleration.  This comment includes its software acceleration.  The company explained that its Reefshark chipset can be equipped on the Airframe server and can perform better than a non-accelerated server:

• Layer 1 and 2 offloading - 100% better
• Content acceleration - 30x better
• Machine Learning / video recognition - 10x better
• Crypto acceleration

In explaining functions that an Airframe with Reefshark can perform, the company gave a good example: massive MIMO beamforming can be assisted by the machine learning capabilities.  

NEC/Netcracker.  Enrique Gracia presented several uses cases of the NEC/Netcracker customers that related to NFV/SDN.  He explained that 16 customers have deployed one or more of these uses cases.

Full Stack OSS/BSS/MANO.  A customer deployed this system in 12 weeks to launch a VNF.  The system managed both physical and virtual devices.

Expand to a new territory using VNFs from home region.  A customer now delivers services to a customer outside the home territory by deploying the software and service from the network location at the home location.  In this particular case, NEC/Netcracker and its customer do revenue sharing and VNFs include SD-WAN, virtual firewall and others.  The service provider is expected to expand its customer addressable base by 40%, mainly targeting small/medium businesses in this non-home region.  This system uses MANO, OSS, BSS and the marketplace.  The company says in this case, time to revenue is expected to take 50% less time to deploy new VNFs in the future.

uCPE (Universal Customer Premises Equipment) deployment instead of branded hardware.  The company worked with a service provider company to enable uCPE to be deployed as an alternative to Cisco, Juniper and others' gear. 

Google Cloud.  Vijoy Pandey, who represented Google Cloud, presented on the topic of using AI/ML to reconfigure its data center system.  The company's cloud data center architecture has been evolving continuously since it was first introduced.  Currently, the company is using its own AI/ML system to learn from current network traffic patterns in order to design its future network architecture.  

CenturyTel.  The company has deployed Broadcom based Ethernet switches using its own Network OS.  These switches do their own packet forwarding.  Additionally, the company has built its own orchestration system called VICTOR.  It draws upon Ansible, NetCONF, uses the service logic interpreter from ONAP and uses parts of Open Daylight.  The company plans to open source this development and the spokesperson Adam Dunstan said, perhaps jokingly, that this might be called ONAP-lite.

We attended the #OFC18 show and found the major theme to be the emergence of 400 Gbps modules.  The next most noteworthy theme, we though, was that made by a single company, Nokia, which made its PSE-3 engine announcement.  Juniper also caused a buzz with the introduction of its ACX6360 router/packet optical product announcement (paired with other announcements, too).  There were countless other announcements at the show that we will touch on in our reports, but these struck us a quite noteworthy.

400 Gbps optical modules, generally, are expected to be ready for sampling in the next couple months, and then be ready for volume shipments in 1H19.  Most every module vendor is planning to introduce DD-QSFP.  A subset of the same vendors was demonstrating OSFP modules, suggesting it was less popular at this time.  We recognized a sub-theme of the 400 Gbps theme was that vendors, including Cisco and Juniper were both demonstrating hardware designs that are capable of operating at 15 Watts, which appears to be the heat that will be generated for some of the 400 Gbps modules.  At the time of the show, module companies reported to us that the DSPs that would power 400 Gbps modules were unavailable, and the way it was represented to us on multiple occassions was that there is no clear indication which DSP maker would introduce the first working part.

Nokia made its PSE-3 chip announcement in support of its Optical Transport product line.  It was standing room only, with lots of customers involved in the presentation (not just a bunch of analysts and competitors).  We were impressed with the marketing aspect of this announcement, but also with the the statement, "we have reached the economic Shannon's limit" with the introduction of the PSE-3 engine.  The implication of economic Shannon's limit is that to achieve an even more efficient design that would asymptote even closer to the theoretical Shannon's limit would be too costly.  The company is claiming 25% improvement in capacity and reach, 70% increased network capacity, 60% reduction in power per bit.  Chungwa Telecom and Facebook were live, on stage, serving as references for Nokia's launch.  We expect full fledged PSE-3 based products will be available in about 9-12 months based on discussions at the show.

Juniper announced its ACX6360 system (as well the announcement of the ACX5448 Universal Metro Router and the PTX10002 Packet Transport Router).  The ACX6360 can operate as a packet optical device, and with a software update, can also operate as a router. The general idea behind the introduction of this product is it can serve in either the packet optical transport role or as a IP/MPLS router, thereby collapsing multiple networking layers into a single platform operating at speeds up to 200 Gbps.  For many uses cases, it could reduce the number of boxes from two (packet optical plus router) to one (ACX6360).  

​Today, Cisco announced the Catalyst 9000 family.  The first new Catalyst line in many years focused on campus networking as a unified network involving security, WLAN, and switching.  This is a very big announcement for Cisco as it’s a real step towards Unified Access and not thinking of WLAN as simply an overlay network.  To keep the blog short, we will focus on just a few highlights here.
 
New hardware – the 9300 fixed switches are the next generation 3850s which were the revenue work horse for Cisco on the campus side.  The 9400 is a modular access switch, currently more focused on user connectivity then campus aggregation and core.  Finally, the 9500, a Fixed form factor aggregation and core box.  The 9300 supports multigig with no fast Ethernet.  We suspect a modular core is likely in the works as well and future generations will shift the uplinks from 10/40G to 25/100G.
 
New software – This is really about a security in networking and intent based policy.  In other words, these switches take less human hours to administer, allowing more things to be connected to the network and the human to scale.  Software Defined should allow these new switches to scale with the IOT device onslaught that many enterprises are about to go through.
 
New ASICs – As we all know, I’m a fan of ASICs, Cisco’s new in-house ASICs take many design ideas from Cisco’s DC ASIC family.  They allow for some pretty cool security features that will allow Cisco to differentiate from the competition.
 
New Subscription Model – This does not come as a surprise, but a big component of the new offering is a subscription model.  We see 3,5, and 7 year options listed on the website and believe this aligns well with Cisco’s push more towards recurring revenue.  Given the availability of these switches, this is a 2018 event for the market.
 
New upgrade cycle – the combined hardware software approach will allow Cisco to touch its entire installed base to upgrade them.  This is a big benefit to Cisco as over the past few years this installed base lacked a compelling reason to upgrade.  This has caused the age of the installed base to creep up recently.

Ericsson and Cisco representatives provided an upbeat presentation about the corporate partnership, offered some customer success metrics and discussed some new initiatives. The teams held back from providing concrete measures of progress such as revenues. Our judgement is that since each is continuing to make joint offerings, the relationship is moving ahead.

Customer engagement progress was characterized at 100+ deals and 300+ engagements.  
It is interesting to figure out what each of the two parties deliver to customers.  The way the two companies characterize what each is good at and what each delivers to customers is quite similar to the way it was characterized at the previous year's MWC 2016 presentation - with one possible exception: Each of the spokespersons said that customers are using the Ericsson wireless packet core (Cisco also sells wireless packet core).

Roles and Responsibilities.  Generally, the teams still see the roles and responsibilities split up as follows:

• Cisco does "IP," generally and specifically cited routing and WiFi
• Ericsson does Radio Access and provides professional services, OSS/BSS and typically serves as the Systems Integrator
• Cisco sees this partnership as a means to target emerging markets.  This is because Ericsson has significant market presence in emerging markets.
• Working on smaller deals up front, then if the relationship works, will pursue bigger sized deals.

Given how strategic the NFV landscape is for the future of the telecom industry, we were interested in each company's participation in NFV Orchestration.  The partners say the way they split up the orchestration between each other would typically be as follows:  Cisco's NSO is used typically in managing the network and resources (Cisco claims it wins big here).  Ericsson's transport-oriented NFV is typically used. And then Ericsson's orchestration system manages both Cisco's and Ericsson's lower level management systems.

Some wins discussed:

• 3 Italy
• C&W
• Aster Dominican Republic
• Vodafone PT
• Evolved WiFi networks in Africa
• Next Generation Network - Middle East
• W transformation.  Vodafone Hutchinson AU
• IP Transformation - Telefonica Latam

As we explained earlier, the partners discussed new three initiatives discussed for the future:

• Collaboration Mobile Convergence mobile phone used as enterprise device). UC, presence, messaging from Cisco using its Spark offering and Telco TAS delivering VoLTE from ERIC.  CMC is intended to allow mobile phones to be useful communications devices for enterprise users.  In this case, users will make VoLTE calls using the regular dialer of the phone and can use collaboration capabilities using the Cisco Spark application.  Avail late 2017.  There is a press release with more detail.
• WiFi/Small Cell joint offering.  Uses Ericsson small cell and Cisco WiFi.  Together, these systems allow traffic steering.  
• Managed security from Cisco.  Orchestrated by Ericsson.