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MWC “I get the feeling the momentum is there – people are understanding architecturally how to make it work now,” says Steve Gleave, senior vice president of marketing at Metaswitch Networks.

Gleave could be speaking about any emerging technology within reason, but in this instance, it’s NFV (network functions virtualisation), the concept of taking old school network appliances and replacing them with software. And at Mobile World Congress this year, it’s more than likely to be one of the most used and abused terms at the Barcelona jamboree.

Cisco, Red Hat, and Altice announced this morning that they had all joined up for such an initiative, while ZTE and Telstra have also made moves in this area over the past day or so, and recent research from Heavy Reading showed that 99% of respondents were either using, testing, or considering OpenStack for their NFV deployments.

Plenty to mull over there – but is this a genuine tipping point or more bluff and bluster from the industry? Gleave argues that from Metaswitch’s perspective, the company’s Clearwater project – an open source implementation of IMS – gave it something of a head start. Yet the strategic thinking was off.

“The reality as we see it is that all of the promises of NFV everybody in theory understands – agile, cost efficient, software,” says Gleave. “Where NFV has struggled to get out of the gates is [when] people have essentially [got] software sort of running on the hardware, [and they think] ‘I’ll rip it off, stick it in this virtual machine, play around with the software emulation layer, and that’s it, we’re there’…it’s NFV because it’s working on a virtual machine in a hypervisor in the cloud.

“The reality is that if you just take this block of monolithic code and drop it in, you’ve got the same problems you had before.”

Gleave adds, while insisting Metaswitch did not fall into this trap, that the industry had been similarly bogged down in nomenclature one-upmanship. Are they calling it the next generation of NFV? Or NFV 2.0? Why is that company calling it NFV 3.0? Going forward, the ‘cloud native’ approach to development needs to be utilised.

So what does this entail? It’s essentially making sure your software is written as microservices instead of a huge block of code; small chunks of code, with well defined APIs, run in containers, with none of the baggage which comes with legacy material. “Over the next two or three years you’re going to see people rearchitect some of their software,” says Gleave. “They have to; and that will be the test of whether companies really are software companies or not.”

Elsewhere, Metaswitch announced the acquisition of OpenCloud, whose mission is to implement change in telecoms networks more efficiently and to ‘deliver the number one service layer for competitive advantage’. Clearly, and with NFV as well as 5G in mind, it’s an excellent fit. The two companies had previously partnered, and Gleave added that there was a ‘certain mentality’ which aligned, as well as cultural agreement.