 Thanks, Arpit. Hi, I think a lot of you know me. I'm Heather Kirksy, VP of Community and Ecosystem for LF Networking. I've been here at the Linux Foundation for a number of years and I am very excited to introduce and have with us today Caroline Chapel from Analysis Mason. She heads up their cloud research division and she has a great long history both with cloud computing and all the transitions like NFE and a great depth in TALCOM from OVEM to heavy reading and she and I have interacted with each other quite a bit over the years. She's someone I consider a very trusted colleague and friend and I'm very excited to have her here today. So welcome Caroline. Thank you very much Heather. Well thank you very much for inviting me to be here today. So great to see you and to be part of this event. Thank you. So Caroline is actually here to talk about some research that Analysis Mason has done and that we have worked on with the Linux Foundation with LF Networking around creating a cloud maturity model for CSPs who are taking that cloud native journey both from an organizational and technical perspective as well as beginning to start creating the data of the folks in the ecosystem. What are their challenges? How are they developing? And with that I'll turn it over to you to start sharing with us some of your key insights. Well thank you again Heather for inviting me and today I'd like to introduce just a few highlights from the cloud transformation benchmark that as Heather said we started this work about this research work about a year ago because what we wanted to do was really to understand how ready our operators as CSPs for this big cloud native journey they are taking primarily of course with their 5G networks but we think it's going to this journey is only going to spread into other networking domains as well and we we're following really on a tradition for four years we ran something called the telco cloud index which really looked at NFV maturity and so this is specifically doing similar kind of thing but specifically about the as Heather said about the cloud native journey. So and we're very grateful for the Linux Foundation sponsorship of this study. So we in the first phase and we aim for this to be a longitudinal study in the first phase of the cloud native cloud transformation benchmark we actually had 10 participating CSPs from around the globe and you can see on the left hand side of the slide here which parts of the globe they came from and we were talking to very senior executives in those CSPs about their cloud native journey and we had a long questionnaire that they and their colleagues that some of them had to obviously bring in lots of colleagues to help answer these questions a quite detailed questionnaire looking at the various aspects of cloud nativeness if you like and basically we were and let's give it to that. Basically the the matrix is built around the two axes of the matrix of technological maturity and organizational maturity because as everyone who's been on the first the NFV journey and now the cloud native journey knows that organizational maturity is just as important if not more important than technological maturity. So we were wanted to look at the readiness in both those dimensions of how ready the the CSPs were and then within each of each of those dimensions we looked at the level of implementation that's that's currently that the CSPs are currently undertaking the vision that they have towards towards their cloud platform and and what their clouds look like and also their automation and agility. And then on the organizational side we were looking at how far is cloud native our cloud native principles approaches capabilities permeating across the organization. So not just in the network because the network can learn a lot from from the IT side of their business that that may be actually more mature in terms of adopting cloud native technologies. So we wanted to look at at the the involvement both across the organization and you know what kind of level of senior level executive support did the CSPs have. We looked at how far the CSPs regard cloud native as an important investment priority and also we're looking at their open source attitude. Now I know that might be a question that you would pose to me Heather is why are we looking specifically at at open source and that's because we regard open source as a proxy for software capability because the if you look at the 5g network it's being built on a substrate of open source projects and tooling around the Kubernetes ecosystem and that that all those projects and tools are being developed by very software capable organizations. So we think this is a proxy really for as I said for the software capability and I think there's a bit of a vogue at the moment for telcos to say we're not telcos we're techcos well given the importance of software technologies then we thought it was perfectly legitimate to test that and say well if you're really a techco you know how far are you contributing to participating in open source projects. So that was another thing we benchmarked. Caroline I am one of the I am certainly not a person who's ever going to question the importance of open source in any sort of cloud native journey but thank you for I was going to ask you to sort of explain that a little bit more but yeah for me you're preaching for the choir. Indeed well I anticipated what your question might be Heather so I apologize for that. Okay so here are the results mapped on those two dimensions the technological maturity and the organizational maturity and you can see straight away that we don't regard any operator today as being truly cloud native really a long way on that cloud native journey. However there are two very definite what we call cloud native visionaries who have every intention of going all the way and and are moving up beginning to move up into that that upper right hand quadrant. So these cloud native visionaries are being very influential in the market they're the ones really setting the pace they're setting the best practices that the the rest of the industry is learning from and following but they still have quite a long way to go to scale out and to really adopt everything that they want to do in terms of their long cloud native checklists if you like. And then we have the primed adopters and we call them primed adopters because these are CSPs that are actually have done a lot of things have put a lot of things in place but they haven't yet taken that kind of final step of really launching at scale in a cloud native way. So they're making strides forward they've got the right environment if you like to be able to scale but adjust at that threshold of being able to move forward. Then we have the cautious adopters and this is an interesting group because we saw the same group in pretty much the same position when we did the telco cloud index. Now the cautious adopters you know they they are convinced that of course they're going to have to adopt cloud native technologies obviously as they roll out their 5G networks but they're being a little slower and they've got a little bit of a different profile from from the primed adopters and the cloud native visionaries as we'll see when we move to the next slide. Where we think the bulk of the market is today Heather is in that followers category you know people are still saying all the technology is very immature or I'm not sure you know what we're going to what we need to do to to to adopt it we're still sort of working on our strategies and so on. So we think you know obviously we've only got 10 of the of the needing operators in in the benchmark at the moment but we thought I think if we did a lot more we'd find a lot more in that followers category because to be honest that's that that's kind of where the the market is today. So I don't know if you've got any questions on on this particular slide. Yeah I mean I think I'd like to dig in a little bit more into some of these profiles and I just have a you know a couple questions there if you do want to move on to the the next slide and you know want to you know I think one question I have is you know it seems as though the visionaries are doing a very good job of integrating the business and technical aspects of this journey as you're looking at sort of the entirety of the plot and the entirety of the groups out there or organizations out there do you see them sort of moving technically first and then more business driven or is it the other way around or does it does it vary and you know what would you take from that in terms of advice for folks in the ecosystem you know no matter where they are in the supply chain or where they are on the journey. Yes I think you can very clearly see from our spider charts and obviously these are the averages so each individual operator would come up slightly differently but these are the averages of all the operators in the group and you can see very clearly that the visionaries are very well rounded as you say they are making progress on both fronts on both the business side and the technological maturity is also very good. The primed adopters if you look they've made strides forward on the business side almost before they're doing the implementation so look at the cloud platform vision they have the investment priority that signals you know quite a mature well sorry quite a mature balanced organization in terms of one is technologically advanced and the other is business advanced but they still got some work to do to really bring together the cross-organizational support that they're going to need to scale so we think that's the next step they've got to take is looking at that cross-organizational support because they've got to get the whole business behind them if they're going to take that step forward and as I say scale up their cloud native operations so that's so again the cross-organizational support and the implementation kind of go hand in hand as well and then if we look at the the cautious adopters um they they're sort of not they have made quite a lot of progress on the organizational side but however they're not prioritizing cloud nativeness as much as the visionaries or the prime adopters and so that shows in the fact that they are cautious there then there until they do get that kind of priority making an investment priority um put the senior executives behind it you know the vision behind it it's it's going to be um that they're going to actually be slower really in terms of the implementation so they're quite a long way if you if you look at that spider chart they're a long way from from implementation so I think we saw very much the same patterns when we were doing the telco cloud index with with NFB and the operators that made the most progress were what we call the balanced adopters the ones that managed to keep the technological maturity the the technological advances they were making in lockstep with the organizational advances and I think this is a key lesson again that we're seeing all over again you know transformation is not just about technology it's it's primarily about people and processes and you can't change people and processes that's going to come from the top and it's the same story all over again right so so even though we're sort of continuing to improve in some ways we're doing a similar journey that we were on um you know when we started the entire NFB transformation yes yeah it's it's it's really I think it's a story of technology transformation in general people people fixate on the technology but actually you know arguably a lot of the technology is there and and and relatively mature I know you know I think if we move on to the next slide you'll see from a barrier perspective the the top barrier that that all the CSP said was oh the cloud native functions are not are not mature that are not mature yet and certainly we've seen that when we've actually done a similar kind of benchmark for the for the vendors as we have for the operators we do see that particularly the obviously the ran is ran CNS are not there yet the the core on the other hand the 5g core 5g standalone cores and so on that they're actually pretty pretty mature but what what isn't mature is the the the ability for for individual CSPs to to adopt those those um cloud native functions and indeed you know if from a vendor's perspective if you've got one CSP that's saying give me you know I've got my CICD pipelines in place I can take updates on a daily basis and you've got the bulk of your market saying oh goodness you know I can't take updates every six months you know um you've got it you've got a challenge in terms of supporting the the range of of CSPs so you know not not to excuse vendors for for not moving fast enough but I do see that there's some difficulty there if the CSPs themselves are not ready to accept some of the cloud native practices that that are needed in order to to to run the CNS yeah and I kind of want to dig in a little bit to that because you know there's a conservatism maybe expressed there but when I look at the drivers one of the things that really strikes me is the 90 percent that the time to launch new services right like that's a business driver that's a that's a time to revenue that's a develop new services more than it you know it's significantly more than cutting costs and I'll admit I find that a little surprising given that we've just been through this pandemic through this time that's felt a little contracted but still at the top levels of the business it seems as though you know this desire to capitalize to for new services to become more agile to move fast really does remain um a prime driver for the way you know the the end users are are thinking about this which you know it's it's a to me it's a little bit more positive than some of the I don't know the challenges or you know the the fact that you know we've got visionaries but we don't have you know what what we would consider you know cloud native leaders yet but it looks as though we are being excited and driven by something that is you know very forward-looking yes and I think this is a big change I don't I don't know whether whether you see this as well but I think this is a big change from when we did the telco cloud index and the NFV days because there the focus was much more split between operational costs and customer experience so the customer experience did come through but the agility the time to launch new services this the the prominence of that I think is new so what I I agree with you I think this gives me heart even though when you look back and you look at the different profiles of the of the operators and you say well you know a lot of them don't yet have that vision and that the support of their senior execs in place not fully yet um I think what it does show is as you say a strong desire uh to well a strong recognition that they do need to get the business side right they do need to get the organizational maturity in place and that's why I think they are further really along the x-axis a lot of them than than the y-axis so they are taking time to move forward on the you know getting the business behind them um before trying to sort of adopt a lot of the technology and I think that that that has to be very positive because I think that's the only way you're going to affect change and yes recognizing that time to launch new services if you do have that agility you can be a lot more competitive um I think that recognition is seeping into into the the operators we've been talking to yeah and I'll just you know for me too like sort of this as we're beginning you know we know we're not fully out of the pandemic and everything but you know we're emerging from what has felt you know like a challenging time um you know the fact that we're sort of primed to be looking at new services that we are further along and our understanding of this feels like you know we're we're maybe on the cusp of something you know very exciting uh if we really really you know sort of put our our hearts and minds to it and our you know our our shoulders to the grindstone so to speak well well to be fair Heather I think the pandemic has actually driven um a lot of change and a lot of change in terms of service demand you know a lot of companies going to the to the cloud a lot of uh demand a lot of well but maybe not so much in consumer behavior but certainly in enterprise behavior as they've realized that their supply chains that their businesses themselves are not resilient so you know and networks and the telecoms industry have been the net beneficiaries of the fact that you know companies are are actually changing their practices and processes going to the cloud needing connectivity more than ever and I think that actually the pandemic has kind of is kind of driving this acceleration in the need for new services um to which our industry needs to respond yeah and I think that actually sort of echoes I think a lot of what Andre said when he kicked us off this morning as well when he was talking about the impact on AT&T of just the the giant increases in data and the growing sort of necessity of access to that data for lots of people that the pandemic sort of threw up so yeah I mean yeah yeah so let's let's maybe move on a little bit to the the the open source proxy which once again is not perhaps across this entire breadth of operators quite perhaps as much as we might have hoped but you know I think when you and I were talking about the report it sort of indicates you know that we are still growing we're still getting to to the place where we really need to invest in open source in order to invest in this network transformation and this digital journey yes I think open source is so critical that whole Kubernetes ecosystem is so critical now to the 5g network that I think it is is a big well a big disappointment I think that that operators are not participating more fully yet in in in some of these projects obviously we've got some very very significant you know contributors and and well and people at least who are sort of participating a little but I think it's kind of worrying that that you know six out of our 10 operators said well we're not making any kind of contribution at all or and I'm 50% near for half of them are not even participating in in not even sort of joining any any of the of the bodies I think a lot a number of them said well you know things are moving so fast you know resource constrained and so on but as I said at the beginning you know if you're going to call yourself a tech company rather than a telco and a lot of them are now saying oh yes we want to be a tech company we you can't really do that unless you are if you look at all the big tech companies on the planets and the hyperscalers and and and and even sort of smaller unicorn players they're all they are all tech companies in that they are software capable and able to produce open source certainly to contribute to it I think this is this this is a a kind of warning bell I would say is that you know how far can you progress if you're not going to become sort of more involved in in open source and more more sort of determining of which of these projects and tools and so on and there are so many of them and they're all determining you can potentially be determining your fate because they're all being built into the cloud native functions that you're using into the clouds that you're using and if and if you're not sort of aware of them or or able to sort of participate in them you know you're going to be constrained on that journey of being able to develop new services quickly being able to change your network quickly being able to automate your network and you can't leave everything to the vendors if you want to be a truly a tech company right well so we are beginning to I think hit our time but I mean what I'm sort of hearing you say as as a respected analyst you know especially to our end users is get involved in open source because it's one of the key things to do to drive you more and more to that leadership place and if you're interested in the report and if you're interested in talking to Caroline as she said this is the first year we are hoping to make this a yearly longitudinal study to really have an index for how folks are doing I think on the next slide you can download the report at linuxfoundation.org we just posted it this morning it's hot off the hot off the presses on LFnetworking.org and if you are an operator or a vendor looking to get involved in the continuing tracking of this journey please reach out to Caroline. All right thank you thanks Heather thanks Caroline appreciate it.