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www.totaltele.com LEAP OF FAITH BUSINESS ANALYSIS FOR TELECOMS PROFESSION ALS JANUARY 2014 SDN SPECIAL EDITION
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Page 1: LEAP OF FAITH - Total Telecom Telecom Plus/TT... · 2014-01-28 · LEAP OF FAITH Business analysis for telecoms professionals JANUARY 2014 sDn special eDition. 2 ... The OpenDaylight

www.totaltele.com

LEAP OF FAITH

Business analysis for telecoms professionals JANUARY 2014

sDnspecialeDition

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A round-up of the major news stories in the software-defined networking (sDn) space over the past six months.

LEADER

STARTING SMALL“For the most part, carriers are starting small with their SDN and NFV deployments,” Infonetics principal analyst Michael Howard said in mid-2013 when the firm released the results of a survey of global operators. Within and between data centres remain the prime locations for SDN at present, but Infonetics believes telcos will apply the technology to core and access networks in time, but “it’ll be many years before we see bigger parts or a whole network controlled by SDNs,” Howard predicts.

Despite the hype around software-defined networking, operators are exercising extreme caution. As our cover story shows, the telcos are keen to talk about the benefits they will derive from SDN, but playing their cards close to their chests when it comes to firm rollout plans. Recent announcements from AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have given the market some momentum, but most of the noise is still coming from the vendor community. While the traditional telco equip-ment suppliers are building–and marketing–comprehensive SDN solutions, the IT players are adding capabilities primar-ily through M&A. Whatever their approach, they are all keen to capture a slice of a market with huge potential: this month ACG Research put the value of the service provider SDN equipment space at $15.6 billion by 2018.

2014 could be the year of telco SDN. It will certainly be a year in which we hear a lot more about it.

NUAGE WINS SDN DEALAlcatel-Lucent’s SDN venture Nuage Networks annouced its first fully-fledged commerical custom-er win–US healthcare firm UPMC–in January.

ZTE, CORIANT SEE DAYLIGHT The OpenDaylight project, a Linux Foudation-backed industry group set up in April 2013 to push the SDN and NFV agenda, welcomed its newest two members in January: ZTE and Coriant.

NO DEAL Application performance infrastructure specialist Riverbed Technology in January rejected an unsolic-ited $3 billion-plus takeover offer from Elliott Management Corp.

CLOUD STORAGE PACT Verizon inked a deal with Hitachi that will see it add SDN-based cloud storage to its cloud services portfolio.

GOvERNMENT SUPPORT Malaysian government R&D agency Mimos signed an agreement with H-P to spur the development of SDN in the country. The tie-up is designed to support local software developers.

IN bRIEF

NETWORK OPERATOR NFv/SDN PLANS

0%% of operators planning to deploy by 2014

20% 40% 60%

Source: Infonetics Research

cloud services

CDNs

operations and management

between data centres

within data centers

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bIG DEALS

IN bRIEF

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OPINION

ORACLE bUYS CORENTEIn January Oracle announced the acquisition of Corente, a move that enables it to boost its virtualisation capabilities. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

CISCO SNAPS UP INSIEMECisco Systems in December com-pleted the acquisition of Insieme Networks, adding its applications-centric infrastructure products to its portfolio.

WANDL SOLD FOR $60MIn December Juniper Networks agreed to pay US$60 million for network software specialist WANDL.

vIRTELA TAKEN OvERJapan’s NTT Com has completed the $525 million acquisition of Virtela it announced in October. NTT in particilar highlighted the benefits of Virtela’s network virtualisation platform.

WIRELESS WORKINGThe Open Networking Foundation, creator of the OpenFlow SDN standard, has created a new working group dedicated to driving the adoption of OpenFlow and SDN technologies in the mobile industry. It is led by Serge Manning, senior manager for corporate standards, at Huawei.

bROCADE HIRES SDN GURU Brocade appointed Benson Schliesser to the post of distinguished engineer. The former Juniper executive will play an integral role in its SDN and NFV strategies, Brocade said.

AT&T SETS ITS STALL OUT AT&T in September outlined plans to move to a modern, cloud-based architecture to simplify and scale its network, noting that it will require support for SDN and NFV functionality from its suppliers.

GET YOUR KIT OFFAlso in September H-P took the wraps off its SDN developer kit, with which it aims to foster an ecosystem of applications for enterpris-es to deploy on their software-defined networks.

CISCO CLOSES CARIDENCisco agreed to buy US-based Cariden Technologies for $141 million in late 2012. It closed the deal in August.

DIFFICULT DEFINITIONSSDN has become one of the industry’s most-used buzzwords over the past 12 months, but while everyone is talking about it, there has been some disagreement about what it actually means. Most people can agree that SDN involves the separa-tion of the control plane from the forwarding plane, but beyond that simple definition there is infinite variety. Those making the most noise–the equipment makers–have widely divergent views on what their SDN solutions actually encompass.

It was a similar story at the Total Telecom Festival in December, when despite much discussion the industry answered “I don’t know” to the question “What is 5G?” Bernard Barani, deputy head of the European Commission’s DG Connect division, was clear on one point though: the fifth generation of mobile technology will require ubiquitous, high-capacity mobile networks supported by SDN and virtualised network functions that will make it quicker and cheaper for operators to provision new networks and services.

SUbSCRIbER-DEFINED NETWORKS?The industry has discussed at length the benefits SDN can bring to telcos’ networks and balance sheets, but ultimately it is all geared towards providing a better customer experience.

Arieso CTO Michael Flanagan believes technologies like SDN are an important step towards ad hoc networking. “At the moment coverage and capacity is cause and response,” while in future “it will be far more organic,” he says. Capacity is becoming far more personal, Flanagan argues. “SDN should mean ‘subscriber-defined networking’,” he says.

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400G transmissions pose new challenges for today’s transport networks

Metro/regional networks will face a unique set of challenges in supporting 400G transmission.

Learn the technology innovations that will make 400G deployments in metro/regional networks a reality.

Ask for our white paper: Examining the Cost/Performance Trade-Offs in Engineering 400G Transport Systems for Metro/Regional Networks.

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Is Your Metro/Regional Network Ready For 400G?

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customers’ quality of experience (QoE) as traffic escalates.

Mobile data traffic has increased 13 times in the last five years, and Strategy Analytics forecasts that it will grow five to six times more by 2017. Its research also found that SDN could reduce backhaul opex by 12%-37%, depending on which region(s) of the world a service provider operates.

PROOF-OF-CONCEPT TRIALS SUbSTANTIATE SDN’S vALUEThe second round of evidence in support of the SDN business case emerged right after the Strategy Analytics report. Tellabs is conducting successful demonstrations and proof-of-concept (PoC) trials with multiple carriers around the world. Demonstrating SDN functionality incorporated within the Tellabs 8000 Intelligent Network Manager, the Tellabs 8600 Managed Edge System and

the Tellabs 7100 Optical Transport System, the PoC trials focus on three major use cases:l network defragmentationl application-based forward-ing, andl network slicing.

Network defragmentation is an industry-wide issue because all service providers deploy an enormous array of devices, protocols and technologies in their networks. Because these diverse connections multiply over time, service providers inevitably have to contend with inefficient usage of the network, significant amounts of stranded capacity and unnecessary costs.

The Tellabs PoC trials demonstrate SDN’s ability to defragment network traffic efficiently and, in the process, to free up stranded capacity and connections. As a result, SDN enables service providers to deliver network capacity when and where customers need it, without

Software-defined networking (SDN) today dominates the

global telecommunications conversation, and no wonder. Service providers around the world hope that SDN can solve two of their biggest challenges:l how to make their networks nimble enough to handle the unrelenting growth of traffic volumes, andl how to achieve that goal without breaking their capex/opex budgets.

Recently, SDN has taken two big steps toward transforming that hope into reality. With each step, SDN has laid out quantifiable evidence that it is the pragmatic architecture of choice for service providers’ next-generation networks.

The first demonstration of the compelling SDN business case appeared in August. Research by Strategy Analytics found that SDN could cut almost in half the US$9.2 billion funding gap in backhaul capex that service providers face over the next four years. That funding gap is the difference between their current levels of backhaul capex and the level they will have to budget if they want to maintain

Tellabs’ Stu Benington addresses the issue of solving service provider challenges with SDN across multiple layers

ADvERTORIAL FEATURE

LAYERING UP

PARTNERING WILL PAvE THE WAY FOR A MORE RObUST SDN SOLUTION

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products and layers, to satisfy the specific require-ments of a particular end-user. The PoC trials show that by eliminating the need to virtualize every single network element, SDN makes it easier, faster and more cost-effective to deliver what the end-user needs.

Tellabs’ selected SDN use cases are only three of dozens of use cases, which are defined according to type of network operated by the service provider, the area of the network and the end-user requirements.

One additional SDN use case is dynamic resiliency based on network conges-tion. Tellabs has demonstrat-ed its Congestion Control Application, which applies SDN to prevent bottlenecks in the backhaul network, before users become aware of a service issue. This SDN application enables the service provider to maintain customer QoE while also reducing opex costs.

A MULTI-LAYER APPROACH MULTIPLIES SDN bENEFITSBecause the functional and financial benefits of SDN accumulate as operators apply the architecture to more and more layers of the network, the Tellabs SDN strategy focuses on the optical layer all the way up to Layer 3 of the network.

Service providers obtain three major advantages from this holistic approach. First, by opening up several use cases that require integration

across network layers, the multi-layer approach allows them to implement SDN faster, more efficiently and more cost-effectively than they can with a single-layer deployment.

Next, service providers can migrate to the early phases of SDN connectivity by doing software upgrades to their embedded Tellabs equipment. For example, those that have deployed the Tellabs 8000 INM can add on the Tellabs SDN Controller software, thereby leveraging their existing investments and taking the first steps to enabling their networks with SDN, seamlessly, reliably and cost-effectively.

Finally, the multi-layer approach to SDN is an integral piece of the Tellabs strategy of partnering with companies that provide complementary solutions. Because storage, computing and network resources must work together as the industry moves to this next-generation network, partnering with ecosystem vendors, such as those in the data center segment, will pave the way for a more robust SDN solution.

As the Tellabs PoC trials already prove, by making the network more flexible and scalable, SDN can help service providers satisfy end-user requirements faster than before, speed up revenues and reduce costs.

By Stu Benington,director, corporate and technology strategy, Tellabs

having to invest in still more network equipment.

The second SDN use case centers on application-based forwarding. The PoC trials demonstrate that SDN allows the service provider to set up the desired flow for an application according to its specific requirements, rather than having to provision that application flow step by step across multiple network layers.

Say a service provider wants to upload into the data center all the data associated with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system backup. Given the security and reliability requirements, the service provider probably will not choose the lowest-cost path to route that application through the network.

Contrast that application’s requirements with those of a mobile user’s video app. When downloading that application, the user wants a lot of throughput and a low-cost connection, while not necessarily needing a low-latency connection.

SDN enables the service provider to take into consideration all the factors concerning a specific application’s requirements and come up with a recipe for the most appropriate flow through the network.

The Tellabs PoC trials also focus on network slicing. In this use case, the service provider virtually apportions segments of the network, across multiple

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LEAP OF FAITHEquipment makers are plunging into SDN, but the telecoms operators are only just beginning to dip their toes in the water

TELCO SDN

Look before you leap, is a piece of advice the world’s telecoms

operators appear to have taken to heart when it comes to the industry’s hottest topic: software-defined networking.

SDN is starting to gain some traction in the data centre space and among large enterprises, but there have yet to be any meaning-ful announcements when it comes to deployment in the telecoms network. Indeed,

while the telcos are happy to wax lyrical about the benefits of SDN, very few have shared any real rollout plans.

A number of big global operators, including NTT, AT&T, Verizon and Deutsche Telekom, have deployed SDN in the data centre as part of cloud services strategies. Extending SDN out of the data centre and into the telco network is a more complex–and expensive–undertaking, but some operators are showing signs of moving in that direction.

Deutsche Telekom presented its own simplified

network vision, known as TeraStream, in late 2012, conducting its first pilot project in Croatia. It has since spoken out about its plans to become a software-defined operator. And in September last year US operator AT&T sent the message to its equipment suppliers that it will require support for SDN and network functions virtualisa-tion (NFV) going forward.

Some believe that 2014 will be the year of telco SDN.

“I expect to hear more noise from operators on SDN next year,” Marcus Weldon, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs president, told Total Telecom late last year.

But the operators themselves admit that the picture is not at all clear.

“The landscape is blurry despite many announce-ments, and we definitely need to identify important use cases that would justify a large migration to SDN in the carrier network,” says Yves Bellego, director of technical and network strategy at Orange.

While SDN is a “very attractive” proposition, it is also a challenge that “requires significant work,” he says. “Orange is looking carefully at SDN technology in order to identify the main rationale for implementation.”

The message is similar the world over.

“Implementing SDN will take...about three years, as many operators are working on finding out use cases [for] SDN and developing relevant technologies,” says Bryan Kim, manager, core network lab, at SK Telecom.

KEEPING IT REALThe hype surrounding SDN–and it has been considerable in recent months–stems largely from the potential benefits it will bring for network operators (see box, p.8), particularly against a background of growing demand for data. SDN promises not only to enable telcos to reduce over-provisioning, it also gives them the flexibility to bring new services to market more quickly and potentially to expose network function-ality to third parties.

“OSS is so complex it makes it difficult to launch new services. That’s where

MANY OPERATORS ARE WORKING ON FINDING USE CASES FOR SDN

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senior network architect, at UK mobile operator EE. He sees telcos introducing the technology on the periphery of their networks or in specific use cases, in addition to asking vendors to explain their SDN and NFV strate-gies in procurement exercises, from now onwards.

“We expect this trend to intensify until by 2016 new deployments will, by default, include some aspect of these technologies,” he says.

Indeed, the industry is already at a point at which the operators expect all the relevant equipment to be SDN-enabled, explains Jim Scott, managing director of Cisco’s mobility business in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia. “Service providers are no longer

asking about the technol-ogy,” he says.

When AT&T released its Domain 2.0 programme four months ago it made it clear to potential vendor partners that it intends to utilise SDN and NFV to simplify and scale its network. Specifically, it is looking to separate hardware and software functionality, as well as the network control plane and the forwarding planes, and improve the management of functionality in the software layer.

“Delivering this will require some of AT&T’s current providers, but will also require some new providers with different skills and capabilities,” the telco said. It aimed to start selecting vendors and awarding business from late 2013 and throughout 2014.

bRINGING IT ALL TOGETHERThis new convergence of telecoms and IT that SDN brings will have an impact on the equipment providers in more ways than one.

“An IT company is going to buy a telco vendor of significance in 2014,” predicts Alcatel-Lucent’s Weldon.

The vendors have a sizeable market to fight over. In January ACG Research predicted that sales of SDN products for service provid-ers in live deployments will reach $15.6 billion by 2018. SDN hardware within data centres, IP edge, metro and core networks will account

ASK THE OPERATORS: WHAT ARE THE MAIN bENEFITS OF SDN?l “Flexibility and responsiveness–more dynamic deployment of services–might be the main drivers. We recognize that the SDN concept could then allow us to be more agile while potentially reducing opex.”Yves Bellego, director of technical and network strategy, Orange

l “Mobile operators can expect two benefits from SDN. First, SDN will al-low them to reduce TCO, total cost of operation. As operators can efficiently manage exploding mobile data traffic using SDN, they can save network building costs and increase efficiency in operation. Second, operators can enhance product competitiveness by reducing time spent to launch network-based services through [a] centralised controller in SDN, which will also increase customer satisfaction gradually.”Bryan Kim, manager, core network lab, SK Telecom

l “SDN enables the network to be controlled by applications. This delivers two main benefits: it enables the network to be operated very efficiently and reliably, and deployed or evolved very quickly; and it enables completely new services, which can also be deployed very quickly.”Phil Bridge, senior network architect, EE

SDN comes in,” said Deutsche Telekom vice president Axel Clauberg at Broadband World Forum last year. “We need to be able to launch new services without having to remodel the network.”

But while the telcos agree on the promise of SDN, it is not a quick or simple fix.

“We expect SDN to help enhance our network competitiveness in the mid-to-long-term and maximise business agility,” says SK Telecom’s Kim.

“SDN and NFV will eventually lead to a radical re-shaping of the communi-cations industry, so to an extent the hype is justified. But it won’t happen over-night, rather in a piecemeal manner,” says Phil Bridge,

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for $13.3 billion of that, up from $707 million in 2014.

“Cloud and application data centres will be the busiest of the four domains until 2016, representing over 50% of SDN sales into live deployment efforts in that period,” says Paul Parker-Johnson, practice leader for virtualisation at ACG.

Telecoms equipment makers Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN), Ericsson and Huawei have all been talking up their SDN capabilities in recent months. But the IT vendors have also been working hard to build up their skill sets. Cisco closed its acquisition of Cariden Technologies in mid-2013 and added Insieme Networks to its portfolio later in the year, while Oracle picked up Corente at the start of this year, to name but a few. (see news round-up, p.2)

One way for the vendors to give the telcos a nudge in the right direction is to play on their concerns regarding traffic growth.

In December Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs warned of a 560% increase in the volume of data traffic on metro networks worldwide by 2017, a prediction it quickly followed up with a helpful piece of advice for operators: move to cloud optimised networks and SDN to deal with that growth.

But for a telecoms operator it is not that simple.

18 months ago operators’ main concern around SDN

was the technology itself. Now it is “more about how it looks within the service provider organisation,” Cisco’s Scott says. The operators’ issues are opera-tional. They are having to look at the functions of the CIO and CTO and decide whether those need to be brought together, for example, he explains. Their current perspective is: “We need to figure this out.”

Balancing the potential reduction in operating expenses and future capex against the cost of deploying SDN is also a tricky calcula-tion for telcos.

But some point out that it’s not all about the money.

SDN will benefit telcos’ enterprise services divisions, because it can be used to flexibly provide infrastruc-ture-as-a-service (IaaS), says Alcatel-Lucent’s Weldon.

“The revenue opportunity [from] SDN is in agility. The enlightened ones see it as a value proposition, not just an internal cost transformation proposition,” he says. “[Telcos] now have more relevance to the enterprise because their infrastructure can be globalised.”

In the enterprise space telco service providers have the upper hand on IT service providers in SDN because of their routing heritage, says

Weldon. “IT guys can do virtualisation,” but they do not have the skills for SDN. “IT guys are not routing companies; they’re the Ethernet and LAN guys. The SDN winners will be the routing guys,” he insists.

The telcos also have some inside experience of virtuali-sation, given that they themselves are large enterprises with huge IT organisations, points out Cisco’s Scott.

Fundamentally though, we’re not quite there yet.

“Network virtualisation and SDN are not mature yet,” points out Chris Barnard, AVP, EMEA telco and networking at IDC.

“SDN is new, so vendors are still working on standards and interoperability. Any immediate rush to SDN would involve a degree of risk, although leading edge enterprises are keen to explore it,” he says.

“SDN in the WAN is much more complicated,” than SDN in the data centre network, Telstra CTO Hugh Bradlow told Total Telecom late last year. “The capex benefits are there but they are not massive, and the opex savings are much more difficult to model.”

By Total Telecom staff [email protected] @totaltelecom

AN IT vENDOR IS GOING TO bUY A SIGNIFICANT TELCO vENDOR IN 2014

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Software defined networking (SDN) is designed to merge the

network into the age of the cloud. This most recent evolution of the modern network promises to make the network more elastic, agile, and dynamic, to keep pace with today’s rapidly changing business demands.

The promise of SDN can be fulfilled only if the right tools and technology are in place, so Juniper is delivering a comprehensive set of SDN products and solutions that are just that. They align with our 6-4-1 vision that is based on six key principles of SDN, a four-step evolutionary roadmap for SDN, and a new, single software-based SDN licensing model that you have to execute only once.

To help you navigate our portfolio of SDN solutions, Juniper’s SDN products are organized by the four steps within the 6-4-1 framework.

STEP 1: CENTRALIZE MANAGEMENTJunos Space centralizes network management with a comprehensive solution that simplifies and automates management of Juniper’s switching, routing, and security devices. It is a critical component of our

SDN strategy, providing a centralized management plane.

STEP 2: ExTRACT SERvICESContrail is a key enabler of extracting network services from dedicated hardware appliances, by providing the dynamic service chaining capabilities that enable virtualized network applica-tions to be connected in a logical, dynamic and customizable fashion.

STEP 3: CENTRALIZE CONTROLLERContrail is a virtual network automation and orchestra-tion platform that includes a logically centralized SDN controller that creates interfaces between cloud orchestration platforms and the virtual network, and also maintains the ephemeral state of the virtual network.

STEP 4: SDN OPTIMIZED HARDWAREJuniper’s network devices, including MX Series 3D Universal Edge routers and EX Series and QFX Series switches, support a range of open and programmable interfaces and APIs that make them ideal physical networking solutions for SDN.

Networks need to become more agile and dynamic to keep pace with rapidly changing demands

STEP bY STEPADvERTORIAL FEATURE

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Network functions virtualisation (NFV) is gathering momentum

with telcos evangelising about its potential to lower costs and make them more agile. The reality though is that NFV represents a dramatic shake-up of the infrastruc-ture market and it is not yet clear how the supply chain will evolve.

“Migrating to NFV is a no-brainer. It is a much more sensible way of doing a lot of network functions,” says Hugh Bradlow, CTO of Telstra, who thinks as many 60 network elements could be virtualised.

The firewall, deep packet inspection, the serving GPRS support node (SGSN), and

policy enforcement, among others, could all one day be deployed on commodity servers. SNS Research predicts that NFV together with software-defined networking (SDN) could save telcos $32 billion in annual capex globally by 2020.

“Operators are truly challenged. We need to invest in networks but the current climate is not investment friendly,” says Deutsche

Telekom vice president Axel Clauberg. To fund new networks and cope with increasing data demand, telcos must show the same ambition that NASA showed with the 1969 moon landing, he claims. According to Clauberg, telcos need to virtualise network functions, migrate to SDN and use fewer IP protocols to become what he terms software-defined operators.

“What gets us to the moon is putting these three things together,” he says. But none of the three is more important than the others. “All of them have the same priority,” he says.

However, there is some

way to go before NFV becomes a reality. The NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG), part of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), only published its first five specification documents in October. These flesh out the fundamentals of NFV: use cases; design philosophy; terminology; the require-ments that NFV must meet before operators can deploy

it; and how the industry should publicly demonstrate NFV’s key features.

“It will take a good five-to-10 years to realise this vision,” predicts Manish Singh, CTO of mobile network specialist–and NFV ISG member–Radisys. In addition, “if you are a vendor providing network functions as boxes today, NFV redefines your business model,” he says. “You will change from a complete systems provider to an ISV (independent software vendor). Why would you want to do that?”

Furthermore, Singh warns that NFV has implications for the network supply chain. As operators migrate to NFV the whole industry could come to rely on software developed for commoditised servers based on Intel x86. “Does that mean all roads lead to Intel? That has never happened before,” he says.

Nevertheless, the consen-sus is that NFV is coming. “It’s like the tide coming in,” says Bradlow “Anyone who thinks they can stop it will end up Cnut-like.”

Nick [email protected]@Telecolumnist

FIRST PUBLISHED IN NOVEMBER 2013

Telcos are buzzing about the potential of virtualising their infrastructure, but plenty of work needs to be done before the benefits can be realised.

vIRTUAL REALITY CHECKNFv

ANYONE WHO THINKS THEY CAN STOP NFv WILL END UP CNUT-LIKE

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Art Editor Michelle [email protected] +44 (0) 7956 946374

ADvERTISINGManaging Director Rob Chambers

rob.chambers @totaltele.comT +44 (0) 20 7608 7077 business Development Manager Claudia [email protected] +44 (0)20 7608 7027

business Development Manager Eddie [email protected] +44 (0) 20 7608 7039

business Development ExecutiveAlexandra de [email protected] +44 (0) 20 7608 7042

USA EastKaren C. Smith-Kernc KCS [email protected] +1 717 397 7100

USA West & Canada Alan A, Kernc KCS [email protected] +1 717 397 7100F +1 717 397 7800

EvENTSConference ManagerLaura Maxwell-Bernierlaura.maxwell-bernier @terrapinn.comT +44 (0)20 7608 7044

MARKETINGMarketing Manager Kerry Lenihan [email protected] +44 (0) 20 7608 7061

CUSTOMER SERvICE Customer Services ManagerSarah Pegdensarah.pegden @terrapinn.comT +44 (0)20 7827 4171