NEC/Netcracker has announced its leading role in the creation of the first report on NFV license management by ETSI. ETSI 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.

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. Further examples are cited in this CableLabs blog.

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.

View the report here: https://portal.etsi.org/webapp/WorkProgram/Report_WorkItem.asp?WKI_ID=50639