“There’s some things that I’ve challenged my team to do. We have to be faster than the web scale players and that sounds audacious. I tell them you can’t you can’t go to the bus station and catch a bus that’s already left the station by getting on a bus. We have to be faster than the people that we want to get to. And that sounds like an insane goal but that’s one of the goals we have. We have to speed up to catch the web scale players.”
John Donovan, AT&T at this link.
Last week saw a series of articles appear here on the PAOSS blog around the accumulation of tech-debt and how microservices / Agile had the potential to accelerate that accumulation.
The part that I find most interesting about this new approach to telco (or more to the point, to the Digital Service Provider (DSP) model) is that it speaks of a shift to being software companies like the OTT players. Most telcos are definitely “digital” companies, but very few could be called “software” companies.
All telcos have developers on their payroll but how many would have software roles filling more than 5% of their workforce? How many would list their developer pools amongst a handful of core strengths? I’d hazard a guess that the roots of most telcos’ core strengths would’ve been formed decades ago.
Software-centric networks are on the rise. Rapid implementation models like DevOps and Agile are on the rise. API / Microservice interfaces to network domains (irrespective of being VNF, PNF, etc) are on the rise. Software, software, software.
In response, telcos are talking software. Talking, but how many are doing?
Organic transition of the workforce (ie boomers out, millennials in) isn’t going to refresh fast enough. Are telcos actively re-inventing their resource pool? Are they re-skilling on a grand scale, often tens of thousands of people, to cater for a future mode of operation where software is a core capability like it is at the OTT players? Re-skilling at a speed that’s faster than the web-scale bus?
If they can’t, or don’t, then perhaps software is not really the focus. Software isn’t their differentiator… they do have many other strengths to work with after all.
If so then OSS, microservices, SDN / NFV, DevOps, etc are key operational requirements without being core differentiators. So therefore should they all be outsourced to trusted partners / vendors / integrators (rather than the current insourcing trend), thus delegating the responsibility for curating the tech-debt we spoke about last week?
I’m biased. I see OSS as a core differentiator (if done well), but few agree with me.
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