Market Assessment

NFV MANO: Competitive Dynamics and

Solution Assessments
Snow, David | December 23, 2016
Market Assessment
JJ Summary

Market Definition
Network functions virtualization (NFV) is considered by operators and vendors alike to be the most impor-
tant transformation that the network industry has undertaken in its history. NFV promises to provide opera-
tors with the ability to deliver increased service revenues, automate many if not all network functions, reduce
David Snow the cost of the infrastructure needed to support new services, and provide the scale needed to meet exploding
Current Analysis
Principal Analyst, IP
traffic demands. The next-generation service delivery architecture requires an effective network infrastructure
Services Infrastructure that supports network functions and services with typical carrier-grade attributes such as guaranteed SLA
performance, reliability and elastic scaling. The following reference architecture outlines the key building
blocks that must work in concert to support carrier-grade virtualized network services.

ETSI NFV Reference Architecture:

This report, one of four, focuses on NFV management and network orchestration (MANO), which includes
the NFV orchestrator (NFVO) and the virtual network function manager (VNFM). The NFV infrastructure
(NFVI)/virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM), and software defined network (SDN) controllers are

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 Market Assessment

addressed in separate reports.

State of the Market

Our analysis indicates that NFV MANO solutions have progressed considerably over the past 18 months
– many operators are transitioning, with the help of vendors, from proofs of concept (PoCs) to trials, and
many are now addressing the practicalities of launching commercial services. Some indeed have progressed
further and launched commercial services, such as virtualized voiceover- LTE (vVoLTE), mostly at VIM
levels of orchestration but increasingly at the VNFM and NFVO level, despite the lack of definitive ETSI
MANO specifications.
This report provides a description and comparison of various leading MANO solutions based on a number
of operator buying criteria, each supported by a number of high-level solution metrics. While this report
focuses on the NFVO and VNFM, NFV MANO cannot simply be relegated purely to a discussion of this
functionality alone.
• The NFVO has multiple interfaces, but one of the most critical is with the carrier OSS to oversee service
provisioning and assurance and in some cases provide end-to-end service orchestration (SO) – a topic
which continues to attract much discussion and debate.
• The VNFM remains fluid in terms of its functionality in relation to what the virtual network functions
(VNFs) do for themselves, what element management and network management systems (EMS/
NMS) already provide and additional VNFM functionality provided by the NFVO or independent
VNFM suppliers. In some instances VNFMs include NFVO functions to compensate for the lack of an
NFVO, and/or orchestrate other VNFMs. For a comparison of independent VNFM offerings please see
Independent Generic VNF Managers: Competitive Dynamics and Solutions Assessments , December
1, 2016.

NFV MANO: Defining the Market

Before assessing solutions or products, Current Analysis identified the factors that are important to carriers
in procuring MANO solutions to support the rollout of their NFV-based services. These criteria, listed below
and defined more rigorously in a later section, have been used to assess the various major vendor solutions
available today:
• Overall Solution Portfolio
• Functional Support
• Integration & Interworking
• VNF & Network Service Support
• Deployability

JJ Drivers

Market Drivers
• The NFV MANO market attracts vendors from multiple domains. While network core and telco IT
players have been natural contenders, new “pure-play” and cloud management platform vendors are also
addressing the market.
• The ETSI NFV ISG continues to refine and deliver increasingly detailed NFV MANO specifications,

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 Market Assessment

driving multi-vendor interoperability, addressing new areas such as security and licensing, and providing
more guidance for VNF vendors.
• The strengthening (and code-delivery) of carrier-driven open source MANO projects such as Open Source
MANO (OSM) and OPEN-O during 2016 and AT&T ECOMP open sourcing (due in Q1 2017)
provide an alternative sourcing option for carriers to gain experience with MANO.
• As the NFV MANO market develops, focus is shifting around the MANO stack. Initial concerns were
located at the infrastructure management (VIM) level for service availability, but then switched to the
NFVO/OSS interface for service assurance. Current MANO focus is on the NFVO/VNFM interface to
help ease the process of multi-vendor VNF onboarding.
• Despite the inherent complexity of NFV MANO and the heady mix of carrier-driven, standards-driven
and open source-driven inputs into the market, almost all vendor NFV MANO solutions assessed have
made solid progress over the last six months.
• While most live NFV deployments employ orchestration at the VIM level only, VNFM-level orchestration
is growing rapidly and some NFVO-level orchestration including integration with carrier OSS/BSS is now
fully operational, at least on a per service basis.

Selection Criteria and Product Development

As indicated above, any practical NFV MANO assessment begins by identifying the major factors important
to carriers in a procurement process, and the criteria on which they will base a decision to purchase. Each cri-
terion is assessed using a combination of vendorsupplied responses to metrics requests from Current Analysis.
• Solution Portfolio: The breadth of a vendor’s MANO portfolio is initially assessed in ETSI architectural
terms and includes the vendor’s support for the VNFM and NFVO. However, experience has shown that
more MANO functions and more functional decomposition are needed than ETSI currently specifies,
so new portfolio components have emerged. For example, the VNFM includes variants such as a generic
VNFM (VNFM-G) to orchestrate simple VNFs and application-specific VNFMs (VNFM-S) for more
complex VNFs or VNF/PNF combinations. Other vendor variants include element management system
(EMS)/VNFM combinations. Some NFVO solutions also differentiate between resource or domain
orchestration (NFV-RO/DO) and service orchestration (NFV-SO), supporting service level functions
such as provisioning, configuration, cross-domain orchestration and assurance. All in all, the breadth of
a vendor’s MANO portfolio demonstrates its ability to help carriers address orchestration challenges at
individual VNF, network and service levels in both a pragmatic and evolutionary manner.
• Functional Support: While the breadth of a vendor’s MANO portfolio is important, so too is the quality of
its orchestration. This will largely depend on the orchestration technologies employed, principally policy
management and analytics working in a closed loop. While policy management is usually MANO vendor-
specific, some operators look for continuity with their existing service assurance analytics providers and call
for MANO vendors to integrate third-party analytics functionality with their NFVO. The NFVO is also
accumulating more network responsibility such as for NFV security and/or VNF licensing orchestration,
although vendors differ on the extent to which they are implicit or explicit requirements; standardization
work has only recently started in these areas. There are now attempts, via industry initiatives such as Open
Source MANO (OSM) and OPEN-O, to introduce open source software functionality into MANO and
to include SO functions. A vendor’s MANO offering can therefore also be assessed in terms of its openness
and the sophistication of its orchestration and supporting technologies.
• Integration & Interworking: MANO, of course, is only one part of a carrier’s complete NFV installation.
It is therefore imperative that a high degree of interface flexibility and proven interworking is supported

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in order to avoid vendor lock-in and enable MANO solutions to integrate into an existing carrier
environment. As the diagram above shows, major MANO interfaces are with the various forms of NFVI,
VIM and SDN controllers (not shown) that provide operating platforms and networking resources. In the
case of the NFVI, the ability of MANO to service enhanced platform awareness (EPA) requests is also a
key requirement to address the high media traffic and strict latency requirements of carrier networks. In
addition, NFV installations are more often than not required to interwork with existing physical network
functions (PNFs) in hybrid (PNF/VNF) carrier networks, for which the end-to-end network and service
level orchestration is required. Due to the “zoo of orchestrators” issue, where carriers find that each vendor
VNF is delivered with its bespoke VNFM, interoperability with third party VNFMs is also a growing
requirement. Finally, integration with OSS/BSS systems are necessarily within the scope of any MANO
interoperability assessment to ensure that the chosen MANO solution fits within the carrier’s wider telco
IT systems environment required to support commercial NFV-based service rollout.
• VNF & Network Service Support: NFV MANO’s ultimate end goal is to instantiate and orchestrate an
assorted portfolio of VNFs from multiple vendors into a commercial network service across a distributed
network infrastructure. To this end, we have assessed the capability of a vendor’s MANO offering to
support this objective through the various stages of VNF management, from initial VNF onboarding,
VIM level orchestration, VNF lifecyle management and orchestration by the VNFM, and network service
orchestration from the NFVO. The latter can also include the orchestration of PNF elements for a hybrid
network service. As a measure of this, we also assess support for “complex” network service orchestration
use cases like VoLTE.
• Deployability: Finally, the ease with which a vendor’s NFV MANO offering can be deployed in a carrier
environment is assessed. This is based on the vendor’s deployment metrics, which also help validate its
interoperability credentials. However, it also includes analysis of how the carrier itself can be supported
by the MANO vendor in terms of bringing pre-onboarded and pre-validated VNFs from not only the
MANO vendor but, more importantly, third party VNF suppliers. Most vendors have set up NFV
ecosystems, developer portals and supply professional services to facilitate this process. Going one step
further, MANO vendors also need to assist the carrier with the capability to easily create, modify and
deploy (and eventually retire) new services in a “DevOps” fashion.

Competitive Matrix Summary

Since the first formal assessment of vendor MANO offerings in June 2016, the Current Analysis’ NFV
MANO competitive matrix summary has been extended and enhanced as follows:
Competitive Matrix: Expanded Scope
• ADVA (Ensemble), Ciena (Blue Planet), Gigaspaces (Cloudify Telecom Edition) and RIFT.io (RIFT.ware)
have been added to the matrix.
• The separation of Service Orchestration, NFVO and VNFM functionality within the vendor’s MANO
portfolio has been assessed.
• Active participation of a vendor in open source MANO projects and the incorporation of open source
MANO software into products been assessed.
• The NFVO’s capability to manage third party VNFMs has been assessed.
• The NFVO/VNFM’s capability to manage complex hybrid network services has been assessed.

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Competitive Matrix Summary

Due to the added vendor and metrics complexity, the competitive matrix has been rationalized to more of a
“heat map” representation, with less textual content.
• Metric cells remain color-coded, highlighting above average (green), below average (red), and average
(yellow) rankings.
• For all but the “Solution Portfolio” metrics, text is only added to cells with above (green) or below (red)
average rankings.
• Average (yellow) rankings do not attract any text; absence of text does not imply weakness, simply
expected or average capability.

ADVA AMDOCS Ciena CISCO ERICSSON GIGASPACES HPE

SOLUTION PORTFOLIO
NFV Orchestration Network Network
(NFVO) Ensemble Cloud Service Cloud Cloud Cloudify / NFV
Blue Planet
Orchestrator Orchestrator / Services Manager Aria Director
Active Inventory Orchestrator
Service Orchestration Network
Network
(SO) Ensemble Blue Planet Cloud Cloud Cloudify / Service
Cloud Service
Orchestrator MDSO Services Manager Aria Director
Orchestrator
Orchestrator
VNF Management Cloud
Network Elastic Cloudify /
(VNFM) Ensemble Manager NFV
Cloud Service Blue Planet Services Generic /
Orchestrator / Network Director
Orchestrator Controller VNFM
Manager
FUNCTIONAL SUPPORT
Policy & Analytics

Security & Licensing Very Very

Security
comprehen- comprehen-
Strategy
sive sive
Data Models, Open
Source and / or Open Source
AT&T ECOMP
Other Differentiating Aria/TOSCA
Functionality
INTEGRATION & INTERWORKING STATUS
VIM, NFVI & EPA

VNFM & SDN

Controllers
OSS, BSS and Service
OPEN-O
Orchestrators
VNS & SERVICE SUPPORT

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VNFs Onboarded (VM) >5 own, >60 own,

37 3P 5 own, ~40 3p
1 3P 20 3P
VNFs Validated (VNFM) Undisclosed

Complex Network
Services Orchestrated
(VNFMNFVO)incl hybrid
DEPLOYABILITY
Operator & VNF Devel- No Vendor Cloud-native
OpenNFV
oper Support Strengths ecosystem VNF Program
Live VNFM Deployments
(Own and 3rd party Undisclosed
VNFs)
Live NFVO Deployments 13 live
10-20 live
& OSS Integrations deploy-
1 live deployments
ments
development including
Undisclosed including
not integrated NFVO and
NFVO
with OSS OSS integra-
and OSS
tion
integration

HUAWEI NETCRACKER NOKIA ORACLE RIFT.IO ZTE

SOLUTION PORTFOLIO
NFV Orchestration (NFVO) CloudOpera RT MANO CloudBand Network Service
RIFT.ware vManager
Orc hestrator Network Network Orchestration
NFVO (RO)
NFV-RO Orchestration Director Solution
Service Orchestration (SO) CloudOpera End-to-End CloudBand Rapid Service
RIFT.ware
Orc hestrator Service Network and Order Deliv- vManager (SO)
NFVO
NFV-SO Orchestration Director ery Solution
VNF Management (VNFM) Network Service
CloudBand Orchestration
CloudOpera Orc RT MANO VNF RIFT.ware vManager
Application Solution /
hestrator CGM Management VNFM (VNFM-G)
Manager Application
Orchestrator
FUNCTIONAL SUPPORT
Policy & Analytics Closed Loop
Carrier-level Network
Automation &
Policy Slicing
Assurance
Security & Licensing Very
comprehensive

Data Models, Open Source Open

and / or Other Differenti- Source
ating Functionality MANO
(OSM)

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INTEGRATION & INTERWORKING STATUS

VIM, NFVI & EPA EPA with
3P NFVI
Blueprints
VNFM & SDN Extensive 3P Extensive 3P
Controllers VNFMs VNFMs
OSS, BSS and Service Business
Extensive 3P
Orchestrators Enablement
OSS & BSS
Applications
VNS & SERVICE SUPPORT
VNFs Onboarded (VM) > 10 own, 125 20 own,
3P 30 3P
VNFs Validated (VNFM) > 110 (own
As above
and 3P)
Complex Network Services No hybrid vEPC, vVoLTE,
Orchestrated (VNFMNFVO) service 5G Network
incl hybrid support Slicing
DEPLOYABILITY
Operator & VNF Developer CloudBand
Support Strengths NG Vendor Ecosystem
Ecosystem & Cloud
VDOC Verification
Testing
Live VNFM Deployments 22 own,
(Own and 3rd party VNFs) 47 own, 14 3P 12 3P (all Undisclosed Undisclosed
VNFM-G)
Live NFVO Deployments & 10 live
24 live deploy-
OSS Integrations deployments
ments including
Undisclosed Undisclosed including
NFVO and OSS
NFVO and OSS
integration
integration

Abbreviation: “3P” (Third Party)

MANO: Competitive Positioning and Assessment

For all the assessed vendors, an overall Current Analysis ranking (Vulnerable, Competitive, Strong, Very
Strong, Leader) has been assigned, supported by a justification and recommended vendor actions where
appropriate:
ADVA:
ADVA’s Ensemble Orchestrator portfolio performs solidly across all dimensions of this assessment, support-
ing all the key functional building blocks of the ETSI NFV MANO architecture with strong support for
security and VNF licensing. It is also one of a growing number of “pure play” NFV MANO vendors not
supplying their own VNFs, and therefore focuses intensively on supporting VNFs from third-party vendors.
Ensemble Orchestrator has an active NFV partner ecosystem and has onboarded a significant number of

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VNFs to VIM level, using its own VNFM and integrated a number of third party VNFMs. In terms of
complex network service orchestration, Ensemble Orchestrator supports vIMS, vEPC and vSBC functions
but does not go as far as orchestrating more complex services such as vVoLTE at a network service level. It
does, however, support a wide variety of vCPE use cases including hybrid PNF/VNF orchestration. ADVA’s
Ensemble Orchestrator currently operates an “all-in-one” NFV MANO solution with embedded VNFM
capability, but the company is planning to break out this functionality in the future which may increase the
attractiveness of the portfolio. ADVA should consider strengthening its service orchestration to keep in step
with rivals, and needs to show more public live NFVO deployments including integration with customer
OSS.
Amdocs:
Amdocs was one of the first companies to highlight the importance of continuous real-time fulfillment and
assurance of NFV-based services using its “Sensei” technology which makes extensive use of policy. Amdocs’
Network Cloud Service Orchestrator (NCSO) provides tight integration with Amdocs’ telco IT assets, and
the company has developed an extensive NFV partner ecosystem with a wide variety of third-party VNFs.
That said, Amdocs has been hindered by disclosure policies on the number of VNFs actually onboarded,
tested to the VNFM level and in interworking with third party VNFMs and OSSs. However, Amdocs’
flagship partnership contract with AT&T for ECOMP systems integration in July 2016 and management of
ECOMP’s impending release into open source in Q1 2017 significantly endorses and strengthens Amdocs’
overall offering. Nevertheless it is not yet clear how this will impact Amdocs’ existing NCSO product and
whether it will help break down what so far has been a more monolithic NFV MANO offering than most.
Ciena:
Ciena’s Blue Planet portfolio performs solidly across all dimensions of this assessment, supporting all the
key functional building blocks of the ETSI NFV MANO architecture with a longstanding emphasis on
service orchestration. It is also one of a growing number of “pure play” NFV MANO vendors not supply-
ing their own VNFs and therefore has a major focus on supporting VNFs from third party vendors. Blue
Planet has an active VNF partner ecosystem and a DevOps Toolkit for operators. In terms of traction, Blue
Planet has flagship presence in Orange Business Services, a long-term relationship supporting CenturyLink,
and a strong overall NFVO deployment count including customer OSS integrations. While Blue Planet is
normally deployed as an “all-in-one” NFV MANO solution, the product’s micro-services architecture allows
to functionality to be packaged and deployed as needed and the company plans to break out its embedded
VNFM into a standalone capability.
Cisco:
Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) NFVO was derived from its acquisition of Tail-f Systems
and, together with its Elastic Services Controller (ESC) VNFM, represent the company’s primary ETSI-
compliant MANO assets, forming part of its wider Evolved Services Platform (ESP) NFV offering. As part
of its MANO offering, Cisco has also added its Virtual Topology System (VTS) to enhance its SDN control
capabilities, and equipped its MANO offering with security and licensing orchestration to a greater degree
than most other compared offerings. However, when it comes to MANO deployments at various orchestra-
tion levels, the company is unable to disclose any quantitative information, though the company points
toward work with high profile operators in the U.S. and Europe. Cisco needs to provide more visibility of its
MANO offering in live operation supporting third-party VNFs to validate and demonstrate the competitive
advantages of its solution.
Ericsson:
The Ericsson Cloud Manager (ECM) is surrounded by market leading products in both network and telco
IT (OSS/BSS) domains. As such, the company’s offering is well placed to bring the best of both worlds into

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its NFV MANO offering and help carriers bridge the divide. Ericsson has clearly adopted an evolutionary
rather than revolutionary approach to NFV MANO, for example by merging VNFM with EMS functional-
ity in the Ericsson Network Manager (ENM) easing operator challenges in multi-vendor VNF management
and hybrid network operation. Nevertheless, despite significantly ramping up the number of ECM com-
mercial “full stack” contracts during 2016, the company reports very few third party VNFs onboarded and
orchestrated in a live network compared with rivals. Ericsson needs to increase that number and consider the
advantages of launching its own multi-vendor VNF ecosystem to avoid ECM being portrayed as a platform
for Ericsson VNFs only.

Gigaspaces:
Gigaspaces’ Cloudify Telecom Edition is a “pure play” orchestration framework using the community-led
ARIA TOSCA project as the core of its NFV-RO and NFV-SO offerings. Cloudify can also serve as a generic
VNFM and all components can be deployed individually or together. Cloudify is an open source offering,
a key orchestration component of the OPEN-O project, and, according to the company, is also being used
as part of the offerings of other vendors in this comparison, in a large US operator’s solution, and by an
increasing number of system integrators. Consequently the volume and variety of VNFs onboarded to, and
network services orchestrated by, Cloudify is not only large, but also unknown. Nevertheless, information
available puts Cloudify at generally the same level of deployment as vendors rated Very Strong and above in
this comparison. Gigaspaces is also driving VNF onboarding by helping VNF vendors transition to a cloud-
native architecture under the Cloudify Cloud-native VNF Program.
HPE:
With the advent of an increasing number of “pure play” and open source-based MANO vendors, HPE is no
longer the only vendor in this comparison that does not include its own VNFs in its overall NFV solution.
Nevertheless, being one of the first to adopt this stance enabled HPE to differentiate itself at an early stage
toward carriers and VNF vendors alike in endowing its NFV Director NFVO and VNFM with multi-vendor
VNF credentials from the outset. HPE’s OpenNFV vendor ecosystem has been running for around two
years, including VNF (and VNFM) onboarding, validation and multi-level VNF certification aiming to
provide operators with close to an “app store” experience. However, HPE traction has been less apparent over
the past six months, although it previously claimed multiple live NFVO deployments interfacing to third
party carrier OSSs. There is also one key area which HPE has been notably slow to address: NFV security.
NFV Security is now receiving attention in the standards bodies and HPE needs to identify its strategy and
plans to support this requirement.
Huawei:
Huawei’s NFV MANO offering is increasingly positioned as a distinct element of its overarching Infrastruc-
ture Enabling System (IES), branded as “CloudOpera.” The CloudOpera Orchestrator NFV-RO (Resource
Orchestrator), NFV-SO (Service Orchestrator) and CGM (Cloud Generic Manager) VNF Manager work
into the CloudOpera ICT Orchestrator (ICT-O) which orchestrates across all cloud, SDN/NFV and legacy
network resources. As a result, Huawei’s NFV MANO Policy and Analytics solution benefits from a wider
orchestration perspective than most and is also capable of interworking with third party policy and analytics
packages at various levels of the architecture. Huawei has been careful from the outset to promote the multi-
vendor capabilities of its offering and, for example, is involved in third party VNF and VNFM interworking
projects in China with other major vendors in this comparison. Third party interoperability has also trans-
lated into a high number of live deployments orchestrating third party VNFs to VNFM level. Nevertheless,
while Huawei also has a high number of live NFVO deployments, they are “full stack” (orchestrating only
Huawei VNFs) and integration with third party OSS is limited to a single instance.

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Netcracker:
Netcracker emerged as the overall leader in the first formal comparison of vendor MANO offerings in
June and has maintained this position six months later. While the company’s telco IT portfolio and Agile
Virtualization Platform (AVP) is dauntingly complex, there can be little doubt as to its comprehensiveness
in providing a platform capable of supporting almost every aspect of the carrier NFV MANO journey.
Netcracker’s NFVO and VNFM, located in the Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) suite, are among
the most functionally sophisticated of compared vendors. Nevertheless, it is the operational wrap and the
onboarding of a very high number of third party VNFs, Netcracker’s “next generation” Partner Ecosystem
and orchestration at VNFM level and above which fuels the company’s leading position. Netcracker has
carried these capabilities forward into multiple live MANO deployments at NFVO level, including integra-
tions with carrier OSSs and strong BSS integration features. However, while Netcracker’s AVP together with
its services offering is very comprehensive, it may also be too heavyweight for smaller carriers.
Nokia:
Among compared solutions, Nokia’s CloudBand remains one of the clearest in terms of maintaining the
functional separation between NFVO, VNFM and OSS/EMS components. Its VNFM, the CloudBand
Application Manager, is one of the few compared products operating as a standalone VNFM for both the
company’s own and partner VNFs, providing it with enhanced VNFM-G credentials. Nokia has also focused
on easing the VNF onboarding process for both VNF vendors and carriers by addressing prerequisites
such as multivendor NFVI validation, EPA support and VNF templating using open source tools. Nokia’s
CloudBand NFV Ecosystem is likely the longest running and best known in the industry and along with its
VNF onboarding focus has helped in enabling a high number of live third party VNF deployments. How-
ever, when it comes to interfacing to existing carrier OSSs, Nokia a pears to be behind the curve; this is now
the area in which Nokia needs to show traction.
Oracle:
Oracle Communications’ Network Service Orchestrator (OC NSO) delivers all expected functionality, being
surrounded by Oracle’s wider portfolio of NFV offerings including OSS and NFVI. NSO is showing steady
traction as a multi-vendor VNF platform, onboarding an increasing number of third party partner VNFs,
and capable of orchestrating complex network services such as VoLTE and VoWiFi. Oracle also clearly distin-
guishes between customer- and network-facing orchestration functions and has shown practical innovation
around the management of composite (combined PNF/VNF) network functions in its VNFM-S, the Oracle
Communications Application Orchestrator (OCAO). It has been active and customer-driven in the integra-
tion of specific third party analytics packages into its orchestration schema. While deployment successes at
either VNFM and/or NFVO levels are undisclosed, conversations with officials indicate an increasing market
“pull” for NSO; proof points are still required to validate NSO’s interoperabi ity with third party OSSs.
RIFT.io:
RIFT.io’s RIFT.ware is a “pure play” NFV platform offering for “network service virtualization” (NSV)
designed to ease and speed up the process of onboarding and managing third party network functions and
services. In terms of the ETSI NFV MANO architecture, RIFT.ware supports the NFVO and VNFM
functions but both are tied very closely to a hyperscale multi-VIM approach. In terms of MANO functional
support RIFT.io is one of best balanced offerings in this comparison across the policy, analytics, security
and licensing dimension. RIFT.io is a founding member and seed code provider to the ETSI-aligned Open
Software MANO (OSM) project, in which it operates as the NFV-SO into Telefónica’s NFV-RO and Ca-
nonical’s Juju VNFM. While OSM provides Rift.io with significant exposure to a large number of operators
and VNF vendors, the RIFT.ware commercial version assessed in this report is not yet in live deployment or
supporting hybrid network (PNF/VNF) orchestration. However, according to the company, RIFT.ware is
currently deployed in five Tier 1 service provider network PoCs, with two expected to become commercial in

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Q1 2017.
ZTE:
Like Huawei, ZTE’s MANO offering has only recently become more visible to the wider market, firstly
through PoCs and then through large Chinese operator engagements. ZTE’s overarching MICT-OS solution
includes the NFV MANO “vManager” which supports NFVORO, NFVO-SO and VNFM-G/S functional-
ity, deployable together or individually. vManager has been successful in onboarding and orchestrating a high
number of third party VNFs to VNFM level and in orchestrating high complexity network services, includ-
ing hybrid operation, even venturing into the 5G network slice management domain. ZTE is also one of the
few vendors to reveal its offering interworks with third party OSSs from multiple rivals in this comparison
and a number of homegrown OSS/BSS from operators. Since the June assessment, ZTE’s offering has made
greater strides in almost every dimension of the NFV MANO segment than rivals and appears no longer
confined to a domestic setting in order to demonstrate its solution attractiveness. Nevetheless, it now needs
to ramp up live deployments of vManager with more Tier 1 operators outside China.

MANO: Looking Forward

The results of this second solution level assessment of vendor’s offerings show that the competitive landscape
reflects the ongoing contest between network, IT and cloud management vendors to own the NFV MANO
space. It also shows open source MANO projects beginning to impact some vendor solutions and the
emergence of more “pure-play” vendors. While player rankings remain relatively evenly distributed, irrespec-
tive of domain, the range has narrowed as some vendors that lagged in June have made up ground. However,
it needs to be remembered that this snapshot still reflects a “starting position” in what will be a long race.
When the next assessment is made, we will be looking for the ways in which vendors are reacting to the open
sourcing of AT&T’s ECOMP, efficiency gains in the VNF onboarding process and, of course, success in
MANO deployments supporting live multi-vendor VNF service rollouts.

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