There’s a danger that the length of this list could cause a kind of paralysis. There’s just so much to do, so where to start is bewildering and then we come back to the idea of communications service providers’ transformation efforts being like trying to eat an elephant with a fork. I don’t think we’re in that situation anymore. Yes, there is an ocean to boil, but we have large vats and industrial burners so we can at least make parts of the ocean hot, rather than attempting to do it all at once.

This breaking down of the virtualisation into manageable, measurable and achievable chunks is partly what analytics and network performance management are enabling. These technologies provide the checks and balances to ensure virtualisation deployments are working as expected, the quality of experience is there and the lessons are being learned – often by machines – to enable tested systems to scale up for the mega-volumes of the virtualised era.

The era of the proof of concept is over. There have, probably, been too many but now we’re in the time of the request for proposals. We’re on the launchpad at last, and that can only be a good thing, especially now we’re armed with the technologies that are automated and have intelligence.

We must now let the machines go out and learn this new terrain. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean we’ll be sitting back while the machines take the strain. The virtualised world, though automated and increasingly managed by machines, still has stresses to exert on the physical world.

Enjoy the magazine (whether on paper or our digital issue!)
George Malim