NFV was training wheels, Cloud Native is the real deal

Peter tells Martyn Warwick that there’s a broad spectrum of Cloud Native technologies out there, a large proportion of which can be applied to telecom, but there are  many projects where more work has still to be done and new standards established. 
Most people agree that NFV has taken longer and cost more than expected, says Martyn, how do we avoid re-running that scenario with Cloud Native?
Peter says that first we need to apply our NFV learnings: one response to that in Cloud Native,  has been to try to push complexity down to the lower levels which can help significantly to ease its  introduction. He thinks Cloud Native won’t take as long to introduce as NFV
So how do you convince a board that Cloud Native is the way to go? For telcos there are challenges coming up with 5G where you have to have the flexibility to address enterprise segments and address characteristics in the telecom network, he says. Cloud Native will create the right underlying technology to do that. 
Can Cloud Native be disruptive to Ericsson’s existing technologies? Peter thinks it's actually complementary to the existing  portfolio and of course Ericsson is changing its applications to Cloud Native anyway. 
Telcos are all building up knowledge and Ericsson sees one of its roles as helping its customers build a holistic view of cloud native, rather than just be good in one or two particular aspects. That holistic view will be valuable because Cloud Native will be adopted to address the needs in 5G around flexibility, scale and capacity. The technology can address all those challenges in terms of technology application design and ways of working, so a holistic view is crucial.
Most of the telcos have developed very specific demands, learning from NFV what should be better and what should be more efficient in Cloud Native, so they can develop better services. 
There’s certainly good knowledge now, but there’s a learning process on all sides to bring out that holistic view. 

Filmed at: Cloud Native Telco, London, December 2019