Building a flywheel at the AT&T Foundry

A while back, I came across this recording from a Light Reading Q&A panel with AT&T’s John Donovan on being an "Agent of Change”.  

It’s a great interview, and my favorite part was how JD talked about “building a flywheel in your own backyard”.  By this, he challenged his teams to start with what you can control — create room in your own budget by innovating, and then reinvest the gains yourself.

This summer working with the AT&T Foundry, we’ve been inspired by JD's challenge to start our own flywheel. We’ve carved out some cycles and are investing them into ONAP (https://www.onap.org/), an open source project for orchestration/automation and one of AT&T primary Domain 2.0 initiatives.  

We've been collaborating with Vishy Gopalakrishnan’s Atlanta Foundry team led by Troy Meuninck on their VOLTHA project (https://www.opennetworking.org/voltha/) — an open source GPON effort.  Cisco Foundry engineers William Kurkian and Raghu Mannam have built an ONAP lab and developed REST API interfaces from VOLTHA northbound into ONAP.   The majority of our code contributions are going into Open CORD (https://opencord.org/), but William has also made contributions to ONAP by adding new features to the VES-Agent library to allow synchronous REST calls and also fixing defects found installing the ONAP Beijing release.     

While it’s a small start in the scope of ONAP, we created it out of our budget, and William is now one of Cisco’s first contributors to ONAP!

Partnering with AT&T the past 11+ years has been an amazing ride. AT&T’s Domain 2.0 initiatives are disruptive. Cost curves have been reset and the pace has accelerated. It’s uncomfortable at times, and not for the faint of heart. But I love doing it. It’s challenging and rewarding in ways that you just don’t get in many places.  I’m convinced to be successful requires being an "Agent of Change”.  

So ONAP will be a theme for us in Foundry going forward as our flywheel builds momentum.