Verizon Open Source White Box thoughts

Verizon Open Source White Box thoughts

Shawn Hakl, Verizon’s vice president of new products and innovation, announced on the May 2017 NFV world congress the launch of Verizon's Open Source White Box solution that will run services from multiple vendors.

On his own words "Customers differentiate between white box and gray box solutions. We’ve firmly seen customers are looking for standard off-the-shelf hardware, and they are willing to wait for this,” he said. “They perceive their risk to be really low…The people who have that are going to clean up.”


This is quite a significant change on the traditional vendor approach of providing the hardware for virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE), network operating system (for example JunOS or CiscoOS), and the orchestration and provisioning system (For example, Netact).
The benefits for the end customers are obvious, you don't require a big infrastructure investment as commodity 8086 hardware will always be cheaper than proprietary software and hardware. Another benefit is re-usability of the box.


Some of the questions/concerns are the lack of control over the software/hardware as well as support.
Quoting again Hakl's words “Really it ties back to people’s quest to digitize their business,” he said. “White box is really just about becoming more efficient in the way you deliver your services. Plus, the perception of risk is limited. You didn’t buy a $6,000 shiny box that’s special. You bought a $600 box that is reusable. If something better comes along, which it inevitably will, OK, toss this out and buy the next one. It really lowers the barrier to entry and execution.”

It’s also the logical next step in Verizon’s overall software-defined networking (SDN) strategy, he explained. In late 2015, Verizon introduced a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) service. A year later, it began applying network functions virtualization (NFV) to its enterprise customers. Next up: a white-box approach employs a cloud model to deliver services.

“Google, Facebook, those guys, telecom either helps or gets in the way of them delivering their core service,” he said. “So how long do you think they are going to sit with an unhappy user experience in that space? So we’ve got to replicate that.” Members of the audience asked him about how does Verizon stack up to AT&T's offer, his response was "competitors’ deploying as “an Apple model,” compared to Verizon’s “very Android model.” 

“We are very focused on open,” he said. “That’s the use case customers want. SD-WAN as a foundational software. Open hardware. Our software is much broader. My perception is that they picked more of an Apple model. It’s much more elegantly controlled, end-to-end architecture, using the software stack they picked. We picked a much more open, partner-oriented approach.”