For virtualized carrier networks to be economically viable, they will have to be simple to deploy and change, with common, easily repeatable processes. A few pioneers have adopted heavily hand-crafted methods in order to steal a march, but most operators will not adopt a new strategy until the time, cost and risk have been significantly reduced. Nokia aims to accelerate acceptance with its new ‘templating system’ for onboarding virtual network functions (VNFs). This will be part of the CloudBand Application Manager product it acquired with Alcatel-Lucent, which automates the management of VNFs through their lifecycle. The open templating system will allow operators to integrate more VNFs more quickly, said Nokia, and to reduce the time and cost of managing VNFs…