I recently had the privilege of catching up with Gareth Price, Practice Head for Core Cloud and Security, Ericsson Consulting, as a featured guest on my Conversations With Dez podcast. I had such a great time, in fact, that I felt compelled to share some of the insights.
Thus far I’m already one podcast and one blog post into this, and as I’m sure you can imagine, one data scientist talking to another, the possibilities are pretty much endless. There are a couple of big ticket topics in particular still hanging out there, like my famous crystal ball question of “where do you see us in five years (Want to know what Gareth had to say about that? Easy, just tune in and listen to the podcast to find out. Then, I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing we could have kept Gareth in the studio for longer.)
In the meantime, I think the runners up need to be blogged. So here they are.
Cloud Transformation Challenges and Insights
In the first 15 seconds of this episode’s “hot intro”, you’ll instantly get a sense of the wealth of knowledge Gareth carries around, accumulated from his own life, his academic and professional career, his “in the trenches” experience, and the amazing findings in Ericsson’s recent Telco Cloud Report “Insights into Cloud Transformation”.
In blog Post #1, I shared how the Telco Operator respondents to Gareth’s research naturally grouped themselves, that those who were further along in the digital transformation journey had moved beyond building their cloud infrastructure into service agility. That. Is. Key.
#5G is laden with application possibilities but so many key business and technology decision makers still have little or no idea what they are. In all fairness though, neither do the Telcos – which they readily admit.
But in order to start realising revenue off of the new infrastructure they’ve built (and sunk substantial investments into, with long term ROIs), Telcos are quickly realising they need to be innovative in their approach. The challenges of Cloud Transformation and Digital Transformation, and of deploying #5G to fully monetise those possibilities, well, it’s not exactly productisation, more like service-tisation.
With that in mind, the natural first or next step is to develop the ability to create, slice, and merge applications & services together in seemingly infinite ways, often driven by consumer and market demand, so that customers can digitally order anything from an application to an entire digital network, customised to exactly their operation, performance and security requirements.
This is where the power of network function virtualisation (NFV), network slicing and cloud native capabilities come in.
There are four key things holding us back, Gareth says.
- Lack of vendor interoperability (mentioned in post #1) – the ability of any VN, any application to work on any telco cloud
- Service orchestration, the ability to *automate the building of service* and the threading of applications into an end-to-end service isn’t quite ready (Gareth says less than 2 years)
- Organisational silos between network and IT and between different network teams restrict horizontal workflows required for service catalog deliverables (also mentioned in post #1)
- Legacy processes. They’ve been doing things the same way for 30 years. The idea of automation, that you can change operations with the push of a button without 10 engineers overseeing it, that’s a huge process change.
So hopefully you’re on the edge of your seats now. Will they or won’t they succeed? Fortunately the full report from Gareth’s research is available on Ericsson Digital’s site, be sure to get your copy of the “Telco Cloud Report: Insights into Cloud Transformation” today, and please do share it with your colleagues.
And of course you still want to tune in and listen to the full podcast because Gareth himself let a few gems slip during our conversation which are very telling. I’ve already said enough here, for the rest, you’ll need to tune in to my podcast.
A big thank you to Gareth and the team at Ericsson Digital for the opportunity to feature Gareth on my podcast show. As always my aim is to offer you a great listening experience, and to keep you up to date with the latest & greatest news surrounding the global #5G transformation story. I know you’ll enjoy listening to a great conversation, and learn about this latest research from Ericsson.
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