The Virtual Business Process: A Dilemma

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Magnets-are-cool 11/21/2016 | 7:29:05 PM

Re: Get Agile - including with version interoperability The telco model is no single point of failure. Which is the same as the OTT model.

It's the failover time to move to the second/third host/rack/room/datacenter that the OTTs have mastered. In software. And with robust processes and practices.

That's a simplified view of the world, but I think the fact that OTT people control a lot more of their software and hardware stack means they can tune for tradeoffs in ways that telco people can't.

PS: Expectations can be changed. Telco has been providing gold plated service for years...

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brooks7 11/21/2016 | 11:23:44 AM

Re: Get Agile - including with version interoperability I would argue that this is the big conundrum for Telcos/MSOs/Wireless trying to become a OTT player.

The nature of OTT is fast fail as you say. When I was running my little email service (3.5M users), we once did 4 updates in one day (not including the constant security updates). This was done to fix challenges introduced by customer configurations that we couldn't test in our QA process.

This is how the OTT services work, get it close and put it in front of users. Fix any issues quickly or back out the changes.

Much more complicated for an infrastructure service. VNFs as imagined work as infrastucture and their failure might have much more widespread consequences. People expect their networks to be up 24/7/365 and not to have intermittent performance issues. OTT players expect people to hit the reload button.

This has led (and led me to in the email service) to having a much more defined and structured process than a normal OTT player would have. This included making sure that our update windows for our larger customers were okay with the customer. Can you imagine Facebook asking when it can do an update?

The situattions are different but telcos can learn from the OTT players. How much structure? Less than they are used to but more than 10 guys in an off SOMA who run an update 2x a day.

seven

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Magnets-are-cool 11/21/2016 | 12:58:29 AM

Get Agile - including with version interoperability As the OTT players are heard to say, fail fast.

Make changes in small parts and make sure they work. Then rollout it out.

As an industry, we've been stymied by monolithic version for a long time. Time to get agile. Lose some of that 5x 9's mindset. Lose some revenue. But run a whole lot faster.

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microcaptechinvestor 11/20/2016 | 8:56:43 PM

Pay-as-you-go // AMDOCS - RADCOM This whole idea of pay-as-you-go is very interesting, and a key reason why the AMDOCS/RADCOM relationship is so interesting especially being tied into ECOMP. AMDOCS has billing expertise, RADCOM service assurance expertise. If CSPs go with these vendors, they can assure SLAs, usage, etc, and track/collect revenue owed from customers.

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brooks7 11/18/2016 | 1:04:14 PM

Encouraging

Sounds like at least one person is getting serious about VNF. Those are many of the right issues. The next one will be dealing with updates and controlling the correct version numbers of the approved sets of software. Just something to look at here...I want to use (cringe) Facebook as an example. Now the basic problem you run into is testing at scale. Hard enough in a hardware environment (Try generating enough traffic to actually fill a terabit switching fabric and see how much that costs). The problem here often is application level interaction, which is really tough to simulate.

seven

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