Our industry has been unable to make progress in NFV because to do so, it must change these old well-established habits. To make the change needed, we have to break these habits and establish new ones that are productive in the world as it is today. This has to be done jointly by the CSPs and the vendor community. 

The goal is the creation of an ecosystem that generates innovative software that meets the needs of CSPs today, and as the industry continues to evolve. A key part of this objective has to be to create an environment where both vendors and CSPs can prosper. In other industries that have gone through a similar process this cooperation of competing companies to build such an ecosystem has been called “co-opetition” that is a concatenation of “cooperation” and “competition”.

This ecosystem has to be built by CSPs following three fundamental principles:

• Software grows organically – give it time and a suitable environment.
• Innovation comes from small groups (start-ups and some maverick groups in large vendors) — work with them in paid efforts with incremental milestones.
• As the software matures, help the small groups to move it into large organizations for large-scale deployment and support.

By following these principles, CSPs can change their procurement practices. They can spend relatively small amounts of money with vendors developing software systems and trial and test a variety of these systems. That is, have a process with incremental steps and budgets for these incremental steps that move software from lab test to very small trial, to field trial, to small deployment, etc. There has to be budgets for each of these steps, and an organizational process that doesn’t have artificial barriers between steps. In doing so, everyone needs to recognize that there may be failures and that there is value in the associated learning process (“fail fast”).  

These funded test/trial activities can also have a public demonstration aspect, but should not be organized as unpaid PoCs (Proof of Concepts). The purpose of the public demonstrations should be to help the ecosystem grow and develop.

Vendors need to recognize that in today’s technical world, software innovation happens in small groups (small start-up companies, and sometimes maverick groups in large companies). Therefore, the large established vendors have to embrace their role as building large-scale deployment capability based on the innovations that come from these small groups.

In so doing the Telco industry can move from the mechanical mindset to the organic approach that innovative software requires.

Winter is coming

As the global economy continues to move towards the top of the business cycle, some Telcos are seeing quarterly increases in revenues and at least somewhat stable profits.  While the vendor financial situation is not so good. The Ericsson financial situation has been widely reported.  Not so widely reported has been the financial difficulties of the major Chinese vendors. 

If the above efforts are not undertaken soon, as the business cycle changes and 5G is fielded, the Telco/vendor positions may reverse with Telco’s in financial trouble. If the mechanical habits of both change, it is possible to have an ecosystem where Telco’s and vendors have a sustainable financial position and society at large gets the communications services that are more and more critical with each passing day.