CAPEX*
As described above, NFV enables competitive environment. Less barriers for competition - better chance to get more value for your money.
COTS** components on the infrastructure level (servers mainly) are cheaper than the proprietary appliances.
OPEX***
Since your NFV platform becomes a cloud, you might need the same people to design and support it as in IT cloud. It is indeed some specifics in telecom flavor of the cloud, but still a significant overlap with the IT part. There is a huge opportunity to remove duplications between telecom and IT clouds, thus save resources.
Cloud means automation. Many functions and processes might become redundant when you automate them.
What else?
TIME is money. You might NOT need:
- Long business case creation (at least for the COTS) components;
- Procurement processes of buying specialized hardware;
- Waiting for the next budgeting cycle if the workload increases;
- Getting headache of decommissioning a vendor specific solution in case of the relevant business idea failure.
The you managed to create the automated multivendor ecosystem and develop strong innovation capabilities, you might adopt completely new means of doing business. You can experiment with open-source software, with new tiny services, scale them if they are successful, etc. It opens the whole new world of possibilities to adopt cheaper solutions or just redesign the existing approaches in a more effective way.
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*CAPEX - CAPital EXpenditure
** COTS - Commercial Off-The-Shelf
***OPEX - OPerational EXpenditures