TIPping point

For those of you familiar with this blog, you know that I have been advocating for more collaboration between content providers and network operators for a long time (here and here for instance). 

In my new role at Telefonica, I support a number of teams of talented intra-preneurs, tasked with inventing Telefonica's next generation networks, to serve the evolving needs of our consumers, enterprises and things at a global level. Additionally, connecting the unconnected and fostering sustainable, valuable connectivity services is a key mandate for our organization.

Very quickly, much emphasis has been put in delivering specific valuable use cases, through a process of hypothesis validation through prototyping, testing and commercial trials in compressed time frames. I will tell you more about Telefonica's innovation process in a future blog.

What has been clear is that open source projects, and SDN have been a huge contributing factor to our teams' early successes. It is quite impossible to have weekly releases, innovation sprints and rapid prototyping without the flexibility afforded by software-defined networking. What has become increasingly important, as well, is the necessity, as projects grow and get transitioned to our live networks to prepare people and processes for this more organic and rapid development. There are certainly many methodologies and concepts to enhance teams and development's agility, but we have been looking for a hands-on approach that would be best suited to our environment as a networks operator.

As you might have seen, Telefonica has joined Facebook's Telecom Infra Project earlier this year and we have found this collaboration helpful. We are renewing our commitment and increase our areas of interest beyond the Media Friendly Group and the Open Cellular Project with the announcement of our involvement with the People and Processes group. Realizing that - beyond technology- agility, adaptability, predictability and accountability are necessary traits of our teams, we are committing ourselves to sustainably improve our methods in recruitment, training, development, operations and human capital.

We are joining other network operators that have started - or will start- this journey and looking forward to share with the community the results of our efforts, and the path we are taking to transform our capabilities and skills.