What is the "right" way for telcos to use virtualization and cloud technology to their advantage? The opinions in our opinion paper are intended to stimulate thinking about how telcos must adapt to survive in a world where many new players are looking for opportunities enabled by advances in virtualization and agile software development.
It is striking that in the recent past telcos have been surpassed by new players in the field of information technology – the biggest among them are Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. From the start, these hyperscalers have realized and understood the need for an entirely agile, customer-centric approach that can be found in a cloudified environment. The claim of our opinion paper is that telcos’ (organizational) approaches have the wrong focus. All too often, they concentrate on specific features while project-based governance leads to the emergence of multiple enablers and multiple clouds, rendering a single general scheme of use impossible.
Our proposition is for telcos to shift their focus towards end-to-end processes and embrace concepts such as fault tolerance, CI/CD, and release on demand in an all-encompassing cloud as the basis for efficient service creation. Cloud native 5G technology in particular represents an extraordinary opportunity for telcos to aim for an end-to-end concept, incorporating agile principles and exploiting the benefits of a cloudified environment.
Many thanks to Krzysztof Korzunowicz who is co-author of this opinion paper.
