Rolf Eberhardt believes that the vendor solutions of the most help and use to CSPs are those that are easy to buy, invisible in operation and trivial to migrate to new services. He says that the first two of those elements are now routinely achieved and provided but that migration is not yet fully understood and remains tricky to implement - and if the migration path and process is not right then it will be very, very difficult for vendors to bring their customers out of their legacy world and into the new, transformed environment. He adds that the nub of the problem is that whilst CSPs very well understand vendor equipment situated in the heart of a telecoms network, everything at the network edge remains largely unknown and uncontrolled. Telco's usually have little idea what is happening at the network edge, how it is configured or what is running on it. That has to, that must, change.

Filmed at:  Zero Touch & Carrier Automation Congress, 2018, Madrid, Spain