Light Reading: So, how do service providers view SDN? What are they saying about it?
Meyer: They want two things.
They want to know how to better optimize their networks. Even the most advanced carriers are using decades-old technology. They need ways to look into the network and optimize what they see.
And the other thing is: They want to monetize. They're just getting killed by the over-the-top players, and the reason the over-the-top players gained agility and speed is because they don't interact with the network.
Every carrier or service provider you talk to has the same problem. Everybody wants "faster," of course, but once you get past that, it's all about how you want to optimize and monetize.
In order to optimize, you have to look across all layers of the network, and that's not possible right now. And to fight the over-the-top players, they could monetize data in a couple of ways. If you provide ALTO [an IETF draft protocol] and some kind of network positioning service in your network, then the network could tell you where the closest data center is. That could provide value if there are latency requirements. The other thing is privacy. We've seen where service providers have been able to extract data, anonymize it, and then sell it.
There's a new life cycle for the carrier network that's emerging, where you data-mine the network, you send the data to some kind of analytics farm, and you program the state back into the network, and you seed this in real time. It's really the only way the traditional carriers are going to be able to do the opimization/monetization stuff they want to do.
Light Reading: Hey, that cycle -- I've seen that. That's that triangle diagram David Ward shows. (See Cisco Links SDN & Policy.)
Meyer: It's a pretty obvious thing, and you have to be able to do it. Everybody's showing that picture.
Light Reading: How easily will service providers be able to execute these things?
Meyer: This optimization and monetization thing -- they're not going to be able to do it soon enough. Any one of these carriers is in a fight for their lives against someone like Google. They need this now, and they don't have standardized ways to do it, so you've got all these ad hoc ways out in the field. I see this on all continents, everywhere.
People are writing the higher-level pieces and using API [application programming interface] gateways -- Apigee Corp. or something like that. They build these gateways where maybe you have an API, and they can reformat it into something like, say, Netconf.
So, that stuff is all happening right now. I talked to a few large service providers in Europe that have a large part of this ecosystem built, and they built their own OSS system on top of it. By having standardized APIs, it imposed discipline on the OSS/BSS writers in a way that forced them to have more portable code, cleaner code. It's happening now, and it's accelerating.
— Craig Matsumoto, Managing Editor, Light Reading
