A new report indicates that there could be a boom in network function virtualisation projects this year, with NFV the second most popular subject of research after containers, reports Telecoms.com.

According to a report from the OpenStack Foundation, only container technology is under closer scrutiny than NFV by technology buyers and decision makers in the world’s enterprises and service providers.

The paper, Accelerating NFV Delivery with OpenStack, reports on the findings of the foundation’s most recent user survey, in which 76 per cent of those questioned identified an important telecoms function that had to be addressed through virtualisation. Of the OpenStack user base 12% were traditional telcos and another 64% were companies that now include telecoms as part of their roster of services, such as the categories of cable TV and ISP companies, telco and networking and data centre/co-location companies.

By comparison, an OpenStack user survey in 2014 suggested its user base of telcos was much smaller, the Foundation says, and only an elite of global telcos, such as NTT and Deutsche Telekom, were investigating NFV use. Since then there has been a surge in interest, it reports, with

increasing numbers of telecom-specific NFV features, such as support for multiple IPv6 prefixes, being requested or submitted by OpenStack users.

Container technology information is even more sought after than NFV, according to OpenStack, but the two issues are not mutually exclusive. Sources have speculated that the technologies may be used in tandem as OpenStack is the foundation of rationalising the hybrid nature of most telco’s infrastructure.

According to the paper’s executive summary OpenStack could provide cost effective route to the creation of private clouds without vendor lock-in, since proprietary hardware is becoming associated with NFV.

“While the interoperability between NFV infrastructure platforms that use OpenStack is still a work in progress, the majority of configurations surpass expectations,” concluded the paper co-authored by Kathy Cacciatore, the OpenStack Foundation’s Consulting Marketing Manager.