Last week three events took place at the NOKIA headquarters in Helsinki: the NFV ISG leadership team met for a day to discuss progress and future direction for the ISG, the IFA Working Group held a 1-day joint session with 3GPP SA 5 to align their activities and this was followed by an IFA Working Group interim meeting.

• The ISG chair Steven Wright (AT&T) invited the ISG leadership team to a face-to-face session in Helsinki to coincide with an IFA interim meeting. The target of the meeting was to discuss the status of the ISG, future strategic goals and to discuss how to ensure momentum is maintained, and whether the original objectives for NFV were being met. The next face to face ISG plenary meeting will be held in Sanya-China hosted by Huawei. This mid-May meeting is the next important milestone to continue planning for the market success of NFV and facilitate the broader adoption by all the different types of ecosystem participants necessary for the success of NFV
• The joint IFA / 3GPP SA 5 workshop was a follow-up action from the Prague plenary meeting to clarify information exchanged during the SDO workshop held in Prague, and to position the ISG Phase 1 documentation in terms of the SA 5 work. The EVE WG will organize discussions in Sanya regarding outreach arrangements with additional domain specific industry bodies that might be expected to adopt NFV principles and develop their own VNF specifications etc.
• The week continued with an intensive 3-days meeting of the IFA Working Group. During that meeting the 67 delegates present went over 236 contributions and allowed to record good progress on the IFA drafts. They focused mainly on the drafts due to publication this summer.