​THEME: REDEFINING THE “COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE PROVIDER”Everything about our industry is changing – the nature of communications service providers, the hardware and software vendors, the ties that bind vendors to CSPs and the relationships between CSPs and their customers.BREAK10:40 AM – 11:00 AMIMPLEMENTING SD-WAN: DRIVERS, BENEFITS AND BARRIERSJim Hodges, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading12:45 PM – 1:05 PMNETWORKING LUNCHSponsored by VMware1:05 PM – 2:30 PMSPONSORED KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: ADVAA Snapshot of an Industry in FluxPrayson Pate, Chief Technology Officer, Ensemble, ADVA Optical NetworkingThis session will provide insights from industry leading service providers on how they view the transformation of the industry. The focus will be on what they see as the real benefits and barriers of trends such NFV, SDN and DevOps for deploying, operationalizing and monetizing applications such as vCPE and SD-WAN11:00 AM – 11:20 AMDISRUPTOR KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONContent Providers & CSPs: Co-opetition for Mutual BenefitsLarry Underhill, Vice President, Platform Delivery EMEA, AkamaiTo deliver great service offerings to respective stakeholders, content providers and network service providers need relationships that favors collaboration over competition. This keynote explores pragmatic ways that the service provider and content provider ecosystems can improve collaboration to lower respective cost-of-goods-sold while also increasing product performance.11:20 AM – 11:40 PMPANEL DISCUSSION: HOW MUST TODAY’S CSPs EVOLVE?Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light ReadingNot everyone survives in times of turmoil. This panel will look at how today's network operators/CSPs must change and what barriers exist to that change.Panelists: Bill Walker, Director of Network Architecture, CenturyLink; David Amzallag, Head of NFV, Vodafone; Enrico Bagnasco, Head of Innovation, TIM; Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President, Products & Solutions, VMware; Nicolas Fischbach, Director of Strategy, Architecture and Innovation, Colt11:40 AM – 12:30 PMWHEN SOFTWARE'S EATING THE WORLD, WHO GETS FATTER?Jim Hodges, Senior Analyst, Heavy ReadingSome large CSPs are doing more of their own internal software development; others are outsourcing more to cloud-based solutions. During this presentation, Hodges will cover how vendors and operators are co-developing and open source groups are promising to speed general software development while meeting carrier-grade standards. He will also discuss how vendors are under pressure to operate differently and how their business models are in flux.2:30 PM – 3:00 PMMODERATED DISCUSSIONJim Hodges, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading & Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading3:00 PM – 3:15 PMSPONSORED KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: VMWARE2020 - The Future of Networks & ServicesShekar Ayyar, Corporate Senior Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development and General Manager, Telco NFV Group, VMwareDrawing on key learnings from the evolution of the IT data center, Shekar Ayyar, EVP Corporate Development & Strategy/GM Telco NFV  will discuss the next phase in the evolution to a software defined architecture and how it is impacting communication networks and the delivery of on-demand network services.3:15 PM – 3:35 PMVIRTUALIZATION INDEX RESULTS PRESENTATIONPanelists: Future of Virtualization Sponsors.3:35 PM – 4:00 PMMODERATED DISCUSSION & DAILY WRAP-UPSCarol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading4:00 PM – 4:45 PMFREE TIME5:00 PM – 7:00 PMTRANSPORT TO DINNER – MEET IN HOTEL LOBBY7:15 PMDINNER8:00 PMEXTREME DISRUPTION: OPENING PRESENTATIONStephen Saunders, CEO & Founder, Light ReadingWhy are we in a period of extreme disruption and who will benefit, i.e., survive?8:40 AM – 9:10 AMBREAKFAST7:30 AM – 8:30 AM9:55 AM – 10:15 AMDATA CENTERS & THE NETWORK: BLURRING THE LINESRosalyn Roseboro, Senior Analyst, Heavy ReadingRoseboro will present research on the evolution of the data center value chain, which touches on the issue of what role(s) data center operators, public cloud providers and telcos will play; who might encroach on whose business; who will partner and who will compete for enterprise services, among other things.9:30 AM – 9:55 AMMODERATED DISCUSSIONPatrick Donegan, Chief Analyst, Heavy ReadingTHE IMPACT OF WEBSCALE: COMPETITION, COLLABORATION & THE CLOUDPatrick Donegan, Chief Analyst, Heavy ReadingDonegan will present the latest research from Light Reading's analyst arm, Heavy Reading.9:10 AM – 9:30 AMMODERATED DISCUSSIONRosalyn Roseboro, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading10:15 AM – 10:40 AMMODERATED DISCUSSIONCarol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading12:30 PM – 12:45 PM

​THEME: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE DISRUPTION
A Series of Technical PresentationsMODERATED DISCUSSIONSteve Bell, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading10:15 AM – 10:35 AMPANEL DISCUSSION: PREPARING FOR BILLIONS OF WIRELESS CONNECTIONSCarol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light ReadingThe combination of 5G technology and IoT is creating an explosion of connected devices at the edge of the network, remaking the broadband access landscape. This has major implications for bandwidth consumption, monetization models, network reliability and security, and virtually every aspect of network operations. This panel will look at how network operators – wireless and wireline – are preparing today to support this hyper-connected future, the challenges they are already addressing and the issues they haven’t yet solved.Panelists: Axel Clauberg, Vice President, Aggregation, Transport, IP & Fixed Access, Deutsche Telekom; Prayson Pate, Chief Technology Officer, Ensemble, ADVA Optical Networking; Derek Peterson, CTO, Boingo Wireless; Eric Schwartz, President of EMEA, Equinix11:30 AM – 12:20 PMMODERATED DISCUSSION, FINAL THOUGHTS & CONTENT WRAP-UPCarol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading12:20 PM – 1:00 PMLUNCH1:00 PMBREAK10:35 AM – 10:55 AMTHE VIDEO STREAMING EXPLOSION & SHAKE UPAdi Kishore, Practice Leader, Video Transformation, Telco Transformation The explosion of streaming video is shaking up pay-TV business models, driving up bandwidth requirements, creating new piracy threats and generally creating new challenges for content networks and content monetization. The landscape seems to be constantly shifting as network operators move from paying for and bundling content to creating their own online services to partnering with existing OTT players or buying content and digital advertising platforms. This presentation will focus on the future of video content and the disruptive role it continues to play.10:55 AM –  11:15 AMBREAKFAST7:30 AM – 9:00 AM9:30 AM – 9:50 AMMODERATED DISCUSSIONGabriel Brown, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading9:50 AM – 10:00 AMINTERACTIVE Q&A: PARTNERING IN A DIGITAL ECONOMYCarol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading and Tom Homer, Head of EMEA, Telstra9:05 AM – 9:30 AM5G DISRUPTION GETS REAL – OR NOT?Gabriel Brown, Senior Analyst, Heavy ReadingAs 5G enters into the development and implementation phase, the hard work begins to determine how this technology best serves the market and how – or whether – its disruptive potential is put to full use. This presentation  dives into how this can happen and which players – including some nontraditional ones – are positioned to capitalize on 5G, as well as the impact this technology could have on future network architectures and business models.OPENING REMARKSCarol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading A look back at what was discussed the day before with highlights on points of contention.9:00 AM – 9:05 AMIOT & THE VIRTUAL EDGESteve Bell, Senior Analyst, Heavy ReadingDelivering the low latency that IoT applications demand will require a very different network than exists today, particularly at the edge. Virtual CPE and SD-WANs will both play a disruptive role in the development of virtual edge IoT solutions, but what the industry is building toward is Fog Networking, a decentralized and distributed computing infrastructure that will support the requirements for edge analytics and security as service providers and enterprises blend capillary networks of billions of devices into cloud-based systems and networks. To monetize all of that, SPs will need to have a holistic IoT/big data strategy, which may capitalize on technology such as Blockchain, the distributed database and ledger underlying Bitcoin.10:00 AM – 10:20 AMMODERATED DISCUSSIONAdi Kishore, Practice Leader, Video Transformation, Telco Transformation & Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading11:15 AM – 11:30 AM