 Next, is one of the most interesting panels that you can listen to. We have one carrier from each continent, right? So we have someone from Asia, someone from Europe, someone from US, obviously. And they're going to talk about the deployment progress. So we're going to bring the vision down to Earth, and then you have three fantastic vendors who have been participating in this deployment revolution. So we're going to sort of bring it down a notch and see where these things are heading and what are some of the successes, what are some of the missing things, challenges, etc. So with that, I'm going to just have the panel come in and introduce themselves. Please. Hi all, it is my big pleasure to host this panel. My name is Alah Goldner, I work for MDocs. I'm director of technology strategy and standardization and also a member of technical steering committee of ONU, and use case subcommittee chair of ONU. And I would like to ask our panelists to introduce yourself please and some headlines of what your company is doing. Thank you, Alah, thank you very much. I really appreciate being part of this panel. My name is Ayush Sharma. I'm heading the engineering and technology function for a disruptive and relatively new company called Reliance Geo, backed by Reliance Group. We offer connectivity, cloud and computer services right now in the region. And with hope to expand internationally. On connectivity, we have about approximately 180 million subscribers. PureLT, Walte, and our aspiration is to achieve 400 million by the end of this year. Average data consumption is about 12 gig, and we hope to take it to 20 gig by the end of this year. So on the cloud side, we are relatively new, and we're building our edge cloud strategy. And on the content, we had actually was very flattering to hear comments from Reed Hastings about every country should have Reliance Geo. So that tells us that we are doing something interesting in that space being disruptive in this market. So our chain man's vision is to forward with this cloud content and connectivity services. Two most important factors are first, superior user experience, and second is superior user experience at the economies of scale. And open source is a very, very vital part of our technical strategy. Moving forward, we're doing a variety of open source projects, and that, when putting open source in production brings its own set of challenges and opportunities, we'll talk, we'll share our views with the community here, and looking forward to getting a feedback also from the community, hearing from the panel, as well as offline, meeting with you guys to get your feedback as well. So I'm from Orange, and I'm leading an Orange transformation program that is called on-demand networks, and that is about the implementation of SDN and FV with the explicit intent to leverage these on-demand promises. So it means that we can have drivers that are from the B2B business, so either in a defensive approach or in a business development approach. Maybe I should have said that we have 28 countries as a footprint, mainly in Europe and in Africa, and that also explains the diversity of approaches and of deployment strategy that we can have in Orange. Because, of course, these countries are not at the same level of maturity, at the same level of competition, they do not have the same stakes. So as I said, it could be either the B2B business development or a defensive approach that is an incentive, and that is clearly developing this on-demand network promise from a portfolio standpoint. Or it can be the agility promise, and it's reducing the time to market if we are thinking about marketing questions, or it's reducing the time to deliver, time to repair if we focus on the operations. And that's where, of course, we are quite concerned by the automation. And the last, let's say, driver that could a country go for is the advent of the 5G or the anticipation of the 5G, with, of course, all the business opportunities. Also, it drives the IoT, for example, or the enhancement of the mobile connectivity. So here is basically the orange stake and standpoint as we consider this SDN and FV transformation. Great. Hi, I'm Chris Rice. I'm responsible for network function virtualization in software-defined networking within AT&T, design and automation associated with that. We've been at this a little while. We have the experience associated with some of the early work there in that area. It's largely my teams that have been involved in some of the things that you saw R put up there in terms of Acreno and Donos and Onap. And I'm looking forward to the discussion today. Hi, my name is Adam Pope, and I'm the chief information technology officer for Siena. Siena is well known for a number of things, primarily the fastest networks in the world in optical transport infrastructure, but also through our acquisition of Cyan years ago now, have the industry-leading automation platform deployed in over 20 service providers live, including Orange and CenturyLink and a number of others. And so today I'm responsible for our long-term vision strategy and really what we're building into our portfolio and how that aligns with open source and which projects to be involved in and other aspects like that. So thank you for the opportunity to be on the panel. Hi, my name is Ron Haberman from Nokia software. Specifically, I run what we call emerging products in Nokia software. We build technologies to be used by connected intelligence, digital experience, automation, et cetera. Units within my shop include Cloud, CloudBand, IoT, cybersecurity, digital channel, and so on and so on, as well as the incubator where we build ideas into products and then businesses. In Nokia, we're connected to open source for quite some time, very much attached to the space. I'll talk about it a little bit later. But we also have, as probably most of you know, quite a wide portfolio that spans truly everything from the house connectivity, optical, radio, routing, switching, et cetera, which gives us quite a bit of a good perspective on how to connect the old with the new. And I know that we'll talk a lot probably about orchestration and what it takes to actually operationalize networks and this mixed reality of old to next generation is what keeps me up at night at least these days. Me too. Thank you very much. So moving on and you know, I would like to ask to talk about NFVS-DN and clearly, you know, speaking of my own company, NFVS-DN is seen as a key strategic area for us and we are contributing and deeply involved in on up. And I would like to ask each of you to explain what your company did in NFVS-DN area and specifically for open source in the past years. Yes, I yours. Yeah, I mean, we've been obviously relatively new player, but still given that, you know, within two years of span, what we've done utilizing open source, I think it's incredible. So we've built Geomano, which we call it a platform based on on app, which is in pre-production already. And we plan to bring that into production fairly soon. We have also built our own SDN controller platform. Again, that is compatible with both Onos and Open Daylight. And we are going to introduce slowly in faced manner into the production network. We are embarking on the journey to explore and first phase would be more leveraging open source and second phase would be as we build up more open source cord is to contribute is into what we call integrated tech as we moving towards 5G, IoT, and Mac architectures. So in the IoT, we already started working, obviously, leveraging some of the open source code to kind of build that platform and then build the connectivity data and then either sort of intelligent services on top of it. On 5G and Mac, again, so we have a disaggregation strategy, which is radio, router, and cloud. And within the 5G span, we have started to explore X-RAN. And we have started to already test in the lab Onos-based X-RAN. And we are also working with some of the vendors who have hardened X-RAN controller. And we plan to put that in our phase two of Massimimo trials. Phase one of Massimimo trials is already over. So we had some learnings from those Massimimo trial. But in the second phase, what we intend to do is introduce centralized controller. And we will compare whether pure open source controller works well or vendor backed open source platform works well. And based on pure merits, we'll sort of introduce that into a production network and then build some value prepositions on top of it. And the challenges or the use cases are first one being video, because our network is hammered with video, as you would imagine. And we want to, obviously, use the X-RAN to improve the end user experience and keep our network free from video. Second is more to deal with the external and internal sort of interference. And third is on building the sort of control logic on top of it. So in radio, we're doing that in sort of IP or white box switches. So we're already talking directly to the chipset vendors. And we are also exploring Statham, DNOS. And I was glad to see there is some synergy between different switching operating systems. So we obviously want to leverage a open source switching operating systems. And we want to build that and then ask the vendors to bring the value differentiations in terms of VNFs, how it comes into play. And then cut it across IoT, whether it's IoT gateway, whether that's a, what should it be, you box going into the white box. Or it's in the cloud or in the data centers, et cetera. So that is a very important and a vital project where we are already embarking on that journey. And it's very encouraging to see sort of AT&T taking lead on that. And we will obviously collaborate with AT&T, DOSHA telecom, and many other providers and work towards that sort of an undesirable goal. And third and last point, what is is a optical, which is a kind of a big sticking point to introduce open source there. Because of valid reasons, we started to sort of take Voyager, which is coming out from the TIP program as a kind of benchmark. And then harden that sort of Voyager Rotem part and build the sort of values around it. And that is, we are talking to different vendors, as well as we are working with academia, both in US, as well as in India, be it Stanford, IITs, or other places as well, to see how we can sort of build that and introduce into the metro networks in the FTTH when we are offering those kind of services. So three big areas where open source and desegregation plays an important role. Radio and X-RAM, white boxes in operating system. And third in the optical, very clearly obviously building, using Voyager as the model or as the benchmark and building sort of values on top of it. So the message is to our vendors is allow it to clear sort of the inner weight or go being extinct. That is sort of a journey and that's the passion and that's the ambition we are driving towards to sort of mobilize to 400 million customers with that superior user experience with 5G and Mac services. Thank you very much. So we in Orange, as I said, we are at the key point, a key turn in our deployment, which is we can consider that the phase make it happen is done. Since we have a portfolio or an offer for big multinational companies of the network as a service type and that we are launching or about to launch a SD1 offer also for smaller segments of the B2B market domestic level. And we are also deploying currently our infrastructure, our yes infrastructure by the way based on OpenStack and about also to deploy the core network, the mobile core network as a virtualized function. So the make it happen stage is done and now we have the challenge to make it at scale. As I said, we have 28 countries so it means a huge step and also of course we do not intend to stay at this level of the core network but go to the edge and not say especially the need for the 5G at the end of the day. So this is our status, let's say. And what do we expect from the open source? You said that connecting the new is the old. I would say also to get the best of the two worlds that are the network world and the IT world and not the worse. And I think it's where the open source can really have an added value and prove its added value because it allows a fast innovation and it allows standardization. And as I said previously, we need automation and we need a sustainable value chain. And for these two specific focus, I think that the open source communities that we are involved in, I'm talking about the OWNAP for the first case, for the automation. And I believe in PNFP for the second one. I think that as well as OWNAP, of course, I think that where the open source dynamics is really heavy and we clearly invest in orange in these fields, in these specific fields. We have also interest, as you mentioned, for the white box question or the universal CPE question. And I have mentioned that we are working about the portfolio for the B2B, but it's also a potential opportunity for the wholesale market that we have a look on also. Good. We know Andre kind of went through our journey in his keynote. We had very public goals that John Donovan was nice enough to give us early on. And when we first started, we really didn't have a big interest in open source, to be honest with you. In fact, we thought this was going to be some of our secret sauce in the way that we did this. And then kind of as our work evolved and our thinking evolved, we realized it was probably better to get more people involved and to get a bigger community involved so that this could be a wider phenomenon, if you will, than just AT&T. We had a lot of discussions with aligned folks and some of whom are on this panel early on around those areas. But we've had goals of 55% last year, 65% this year, 75% by 2020. So those are, again, very public goals. I think one of the things that's helped us is that experience that I talked about and the experience that we'll be able to leverage in 5G. So it'll kind of be born in the cloud. I don't think we'd be confident enough to say it would be born in the cloud if we hadn't gone through what we have gone through and the work that we've done. From our standpoint, we see more and more opportunity with open source and I think around the community in general because while no single one of us in terms of communication service providers is as big as some of the hyper scale, together we're bigger than all of them. And I think that that's really kind of the message I'd like to leave this group with is how we work together as a community for that common kind of 80, 90% kind of overlap that we have that we get benefit from. And then with the specialization that we talk about will probably be that other 10% that'll be unique to AT&T, unique to Reliance, unique to Orange or whoever else is in that mix. And I think that that is a big benefit for overall, for this community, as well as the vendors too, to be honest with you, because again they benefit by commonality that they get something they can reuse over and over and over again. And to that extent, I think us working together will certainly help that. So I think in terms of open source, again what we're doing here I think is, we've talked about it all the different projects. But one thing I'd like to talk about is, and Andre mentioned a little bit about this is ONF. And I think early on some work there was very interesting and kind of directionally correct but it really didn't kind of get over that hump that was needed to really put it into production. And I know that a lot of the folks have worked really hard on kind of making some substantive changes there and get more community input, more communication service provider input. So that can actually be something that's truly a reference design that's leverageable in production that takes into account operational needs and everything else. And so that kind of thing, in addition to just open source, I applaud that kind of work. And I think we need more of that. Absolutely. Thanks a lot. So Sienna's been very involved in open source for really the entire history of the Blue Planet platform. In fact, Blue Planet incorporates over 30 open source projects today. But we realize that open source is fantastic as a catalyst to really accelerate, but it's not free. It takes investment to actually harden and deliver it, package it, be able to deploy it, manage it. And in fact, at this show, we've announced as of this morning that we're incorporating the ONF policy framework into augment our Blue Planet existing policy framework. And we think that that's absolutely critical as it gives a new capability for us to be able to serve our customers better. We are very interested in driving the standardization of policy definition and the language of policy itself, because frankly, we believe that policy becomes a fundamental component of automation in general. Policy will enable us to drive cost out through standardization and create better, more unique experiences, but also ones that can be operated in a more universal fashion. The challenge will be to define policy language that actually works across carriers and works within a carrier to multiplicity of operations environments. And I too share your concern about bridging kind of the old with the new. We're probably gonna be in a hybrid network situation for a very long time. And we need to be able to leverage that. That's core value that the service providers have. We need to bridge that gap, if you will, between sort of the existing infrastructure and all the new in a policy controlled way. So we're really excited about it. We're real familiar with it. And we will definitely be embracing the own app policy and we'll be making contributions back and run bug fixes and so forth. Thanks and thank you. Where do I start? I mean, last year was truly a leap year, I think, for NFV as an industry. We have now started just last year over 90 new projects all over the world, over 70 of them include CloudBand from a Mano portfolio perspective alone. We start from the beginning that needs to be multi-vendor and open environment and boy did last year prove that it's possible, right? We have over 450 types of VNFs that have been integrated across these different projects. More than a third of them come from different vendors. Usually our direct competitors, which makes it always fun. We increase our investment in open source quite drastically, not just within my team and Nokia software, but across the board in Nokia. We have some projects that we started, you know, like Mitraj, which I'm very proud of, part of OpenStack, root cause analysis. We spend quite a bit of resources in things like Mistral for workflow and a few others, but across all the different organizations, right, starting with the contribution that Onap brought, I think we're now in the top five, adding more and more developers all the time, working on integration, hardening, but also bringing more of the components and compatibility into the Onap components across the entire Nokia portfolio. We actually don't remember how many hundreds of products we have to work with. I have to share OP NFV, also very, very important, making a lot of investment in the doctor. I think it's critical to the industry. And maybe just, you know, from an internal transformation perspective. We created a couple of years ago a group, we called it Common Software Foundation, which is what we internally use to essentially industrialize the use of open source and more importantly, kind of like separate the business logic of the different software pieces, you know, the VNFs, you know, from everything else, you know, everything that, you know, we would consider infrastructure. And basically end of last year, we, you know, we finished the first round of getting most VNFs on this components and the blueprints coming out of this team, which helps both ourselves, obviously, and the community, given that we are truly industrializing the use and centralizing how these components, blueprints, and in turn, the past layer would be managed across all of our VNFs. Thank you very much. And moving to the next question, actually, you know, and looking on this audience, this is the right audience actually to resolve the technical issues and the challenges we face. So, I would like to ask you to bring one challenge that you find as a major one for 2018 and why you see this as a challenge and for this audience to resolve. Please. Sure. I clearly see three, but I'll stick to one. So, let me mention three, just so interface is one, so interface is one, which is the biggest one. Second one, IC perception, and third one, system integration. So, I'll maybe stick to the first one, which is the topmost, is the unless and until the vendor community do not open the interfaces. I'll take a radio as an example. So, if you're doing extra mass in my MoField trials, my message was a bit strong, but again, I would like to reiterate that message, that innovate or go extinct. So, there are vendors which are, or there are emerging vendors which are embracing that, and they will open the interfaces to radio network, right? So, that is very, very vital for the innovation to happen. That was just an example, and I could go on a lot in such examples, but this is very, very important for innovation. This is very important for us to solve video problems at the edge, which is vast majority of traffic, the service provider that I hammered with, and they make a very little revenue, and it's a common problem. So, if you could solve that user experience problem and have the media agnostic songs using these controller interfaces, and have those vendors open those interfaces, I think that will be in favor of the community, I'll be in favor of everybody, with the providers, as well as for the new players to come in to play. So, I would reserve my comments on the second and third one, if you're interested. Thank you, thank you very much. From my standpoint, I will come back to the industrialization stake, as Ron mentioned, but from the standpoint of the value chain, I think that the key point here is collectively, and that's why the audience is relevant, to make the value chain viable, sustainable and viable, and this means that, yes, we have this point of opening the interfaces and so on, maybe going to a point of standardization for the NFVI, probably, so we can, at the end of the day, stick to the SDN and NFV promises, because I fear that today we diverge from these initial promises, not really agility, basically, and that more or less claims for a kind of pure cloud model and a decoupling model between the telco cloud and the application running on the top of it. And so, to come back to your question, for me, and we have several levels or several actions beside, but behind, excuse me, but this is this question of the value chain that probably we are struggling with today and that could have some ambiguity in the behavior factors, of course, because we have to accept that we disrupt our business model. It's a risk for all of us, but at the end of the day, we could probably keep value, each of us, and leverage these promises if we deliver them. That's good. You know, I really want to cover, there's probably one big area, but I want to make sure people understand where I think this fits. So when we first looked at this, we said, where can we go apply SDN and network function virtualization and somewhat orthogonal? We said, look, we can apply that in our IP core, we can apply that in our Metro packet core, we can apply that in our wireless core, the mobile ran with O-Ran and other things, we can apply it in IP services, we can apply it at premises equipment. So I want to make sure that when I talk about this, everybody understands that's the world that we're talking about. It's a fairly big world. It's not just wired, it's not just wireless, it's a fairly big world. I think that the time, and this kind of gets to automation and the interfaces and everything else, but the time to onboard a VNF, you know, I think it's time to change that. And what I mean by that is that, you know, early on all these were unique and everybody was learning, but right now I think we've got a much better idea of what a Lego block should look like as opposed to a snowflake. And in different areas of those areas, I just described some people have done a really good job of making it easy to onboard and others haven't. And I think it's time for the vendors in those areas to step up because I think, in fairness, a lot of the service providers here have stepped up. They've gotten on very common platforms, they've gotten on common automation and we're trying to make it easier for those vendors to be able to deliver commonality to us, you know, Lego blocks. And I think that this year, that's something that I know we're going to drive very hard, both in open source as well as within AT&T. Yeah, so Sienna Software Services Business really exists to help our service provider customers really solve automation problems. And we also have seen that sort of one size architecture, it hasn't really fit all circumstances. And so anything we can do in the community, we've been a huge recipient of value from open source, as I said, but anything we can do as a community to even drive further standardization of those Lego blocks, how things really do work together, what interfaces are there, then I think we have a better chance to really enable greater levels of automation at lower cost to be able to be more agile like I think everyone on the panel really wants. So for us, it's about integration interfaces and definitions and languages and so forth so that we know the target we're to comply to to drive those benefits that we're all looking to to get out of the industry. So a customer of mine asked me recently, can you please stop bringing me a lot of new things and help me use the stuff that is there? And it actually, it's half joking, but it's very serious because I think we reached a point where my ask is think simplification. We have a lot of pieces, we have a lot of code, we have a lot of ability, but it's complicated. It takes quite a lot of effort pretty much across the chain from getting it together, from building it, installing it, managing it, onboarding the VNFs and managing the VNFs once they're onboarded. And the piece that he's missing is the simplification that I think is critical. If I may just talk about the suggestion of how to solve it, I would ask the developers, think of the operations guy or girl that needs to come there and without understanding, all the details of the code make use of the system for the purpose it's there for, the purpose being moving bits and providing service and add your design based on that basic user in mind, as opposed to the tech itself. When I take what all of you said, which is basically about openness, modularity, these are things, agility, these are probably the things that we need to concentrate on in the near future. With that, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.