MWC 2018 – A Tale of Two Universes

By Dave Duggal, Founder/CEO EnterpriseWeb
March 2, 2018
Originally posted on LinkedIn

I would have liked to think I lost some weight walking the 8 halls of the FIRA (every meeting is 3-4 halls from the next meeting), but alas, it didn’t counter-balance the vast quantities of Iberian Ham, Machego Cheese, wonderful wine and deserts I consumed all week. A great event nonetheless.

Private meetings with Operators, Vendors and Analysts were a sober counter-point to the breathless presentations being made about (enter buzz word here). While CSP leadership is looking to real-time, web-scale, intelligent software to improve customer experiences and OpEx and deliver them from their static, expensive and hard to change infrastructure; the industry is struggling with the basic plumbing for NFV interoperability, automation and optimization.

Talks with folks in charge of actually delivering virtualization are increasingly candid and brutal based on their initial implementation experiences – incumbent and open source solutions have fallen short of expectations everywhere. You know things are bad, when a Tier-1 CSP gets media coverage for taking a year to deploy a narrow siloed use-case that required significant custom-code and tons of manual integration to static and brittle templates. This is not zero-touch! How can this ever scale operationally? The good news is that the current situation is making Operators open to new and innovative approaches, to break the impasse and to achieve the original ETSI NFV ISG strategic objectives (Service Velocity, DevOps Automation and Business Agility). We are very pleased to be a part of the new ETSI Zero-touch Service Management ISG. We look forward to collaborating with other forward looking vendors with guidance from CSPs to demonstrate scalable, real-world solutions that help advance the industry.

If you’d like a sneak peek of the future, please join us for our Layer 123 Webinar next Thursday, March 8th at 11am New York / 5pm Barcelona / 8am San Francisco https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/6985/294301?utm_source=Laye.

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