Earlier this year, the Marketing Task Force conducted its first ever community survey to better understand the interest areas and preferences of the OSM community. The information below is a summary of the key results.

The survey was answered by 51 organizations, 37% vendors of software or equipment, followed by 20% of systems integrators, 16% from the academic world, 18% from operators and the remaining by students, R&D, analysts, etc.

74.5% of respondents had installed OSM and 89% of those who had not installed OSM are planning to do so in the next 6 months.

The main reason to download OSM is to be able to carry out a lab evaluation (67%), followed by being able to learn about MANO (54%), preparing for POC/trial (46%), preparing for deployment within the next 12 months (17%) and the 7% mainly to be able to contribute to the community and the project.

Regarding main challenges faced by onboarding VNFs: first, different vendor-specific approaches for each VNF (62% answered it was the greatest challenge), second, lack of standards information models, thirdly the lack of internal skills and in last place optimal placement on cloud infrastructure.

Regarding VIM importance for each organization in terms of orchestration, OpenStack stands out in 97% of the answers, followed by VMWare, with 51%, AWS with 31%, Kubernetes with 31%, OpenVIM with 20%, Google Cloud with 17% and MS Azure with 14%.

Survey participants are looking to orchestrate the following NFV uses cases and network services: Mobile Core Network, PCE, vCPE, VPN aaS, HAProxy, vFirewall, vCGNAT, vIPS, IoT, vIMS, Load balancers, vEPC, SD-WAN as well as orchestrate E2E network service with monitoring capabilities

Participants have also highlighted main technical areas to prioritize in 2017: service assurance, performance management, fault management, root-cause analysis, integration with VNF managers, Auto scale-in/out/up/down/healing of VNF/NS, VNF configuration and management and ease VNF onboarding experience, TOSCA descriptors support, multivendor VNFs on-boarding, NS monitoring, optimize OSM software to reduce system requirements, more documented examples to explain real life scenarios, Network slicing and 5G Core.

Regarding the rate of the expertise of respondents in OSM the average is 5.2 out of 10. 40% of the organizations have scored the expertise in OSM above 7 on a scale of 0 to 10.

Regarding additional OSM training, 80% would prefer webinars and on-demand videos through the Internet and 9% in person at events and through more documentation.

Regarding industry events many would like to see OSM in SDN and NFV World Congress, TMF events, OpenStack, OPNFV, MWC, ONS, among others.

Finally, 57% of organizations would recommend OSM to a colleague as an open source MANO solution with a rating above 7 on a scale of 0 to 10.

In the name of the OSM Marketing Task Force, thank you again for participating in the survey and we look forward to your contribution to the next survey.