What is your Disaggregation Tolerance Level (DTL) as CSP or DSP?
Part II – Considerations to Navigate the Current Scenario and DTL
Authors: Javier Ger, Rajiv Papneja
INITIAL STATEMENT
This article has been divided in two parts for reasons of length and simplicity. The Part I was published earlier on LinkedIn, which received very positive feedback, and has already tickled some offline conversations. The link to the first article can be found here.
What is your DTL as CSP or CSP? - Part I. Industry Current Outlook and Problem Description [1]
In this Part II, we are presenting some thoughts for community consideration on navigating the scenario already described in the first part, and the Disaggregation Tolerance Level (DTL) concept. We believe DTL is key in the CSPs/DSPs strategy and readiness to implement agility and velocity across operations, driving higher monetization of networks infrastructure, introducing faster innovation, reducing total expenditure through cost cutting and taking the cost out.
“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again” - Justin Trudeau's Canadian Prime Minister
CONSIDERATION (1) – NEED FOR INDUSTRY CONSENSUS ENABLING A MORE FAVORABLE SCENARIO
The pace of change of the market requirements and that the innovative options the customers are demanding, are motivating siloed industry initiatives (led by SDOs, Open source community, technology vendors, PSIs and CSPs) for quick turnarounds. The initiatives that are driven to address these requirements, generally lack holistic vision, which generally leads to interoperability and complexity gaps in the industry in short to mid-term. Due to a multiplicity of solutions arising from this fragmented initiative landscape (many of which have either complex, limited or no options to be integrate or interoperate), CSPs are challenged to realize the transformation benefits of lowering TCO and shortening of TTM. The challenges posed are severe enough that it could even worsen the current situation.
Therefore, the absence of this holistic approach, increases complexity, hinders in CSPs vision to provide a seamless experience to their customers and build simple cloud-native designs as compared to an industry agreed architectures and frameworks. These agreements that allows CSPs building and maintaining services and products across different hierarchies, layers, networks, technologies, and applications.
To simplify the complexity, a holistic view across industry and the complete context is needed. This will help achieve the desired pace that market requires without affecting or impacting the short to mid-term goals, supporting future proofing while protecting the CSPs legacy investments.
It is as important to have a strategic vision as knowing that it will adapt to the changing conditions of a dynamic market reality. Strategy is built and adapted to emerging and unforeseen situations, not having a cohesive strategy is not an option, nor having a strategy without execution for realizing business benefits. Probably the CSPs that best understand this principle will be the most likely to be successful in the future and balance the option of not adopting disaggregation versus adopting a strategy that does not yield promised outcomes.
“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” - Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
At a first glance balancing the market expectations and the agility to reach consensus across fragmented initiatives is utopia. Although it is a huge challenge, we believe it is possible to reach a consensus through unifying proposals while timely responding to the market requirements. We believe that the most important action is to deepen the collaborations between various initiatives that arise to solve specific problems and drive a unifying consensus, which will provide that holistic vision that is much needed today.
In our humble opinion, the standardization bodies should continue to have a central role, perhaps they should review and change some of their processes, composition, end objectives to look at fragmented initiatives and increase the pace to reach industry consensus. However, we should not overlook their guiding vision, and liaising the industry efforts. This could avoid or minimize, the current dispersion and have a positive influence in the solutions being developed. This will also mitigate the current proliferation of monolithic vendor initiatives and the complexity shown in Figure 6 of the Part I article [1].
To summarize our thoughts as part of consideration.
Initiatives Proliferation (SDOs, Open Source, others) -> Initiatives Overlapping and Misalignment -> Vendors Components Deployment following different initiatives/own definitions (landscape is not clear) -> Interoperability Impact (Lack of Interoperability) -> Increased Integration Efforts -> Higher Time to Test Components -> Higher TCO and TTM, longer times to deploy new services and increased vendor lock-in risk.
CONSIDERATION (2) - MANAGING THE COMPETITION INTELLIGENTLY
Currently there is a race for the initiatives to meet the needs that the market dictates at a frenetic pace as SDOs, several projects (open sources and others), technology vendors, integrators and CSPs are tempted to solve these requirements individually to catch up with that pace, and this leads to the fragmentation. As an industry we should play as a team and face these challenges in a more integrated way, to avoid the negative impacts and compete when the time arrives.
The authors understand that these are businesses, the desire to win and the competition must be there. So, the question that arises is how we can compete without introducing the inconveniences described so far. Figure 7 illustrates our consideration based on a sports metaphor. To summarize it, we believe that we must play as a team for the structural guidelines and leave the competition for the last lap of the definitions and functionalities. This means creating data lit service differentiation for the customers articulating them in solutions and composite end-to-end offerings allowing CSP to compete against digital dragons. Also being very dynamic and agile in adapting catalogue of services and products that users are demanding and instantiating them very fast. To meet the customer innovation appetite, CSPs should be open to collaborate and build a strong partnerships with technology vendors, PSIs and the initiatives, which would further enhance that service differentiation. This means generating alliances with those who have the power of analytics, knowledge of certain markets, synergies to bridge the gap in offerings and combining them with the acquired agility and velocity of the deployment of innovation solutions, that continues to build that differentiation.
This differentiation eventually, will propel and bring out the true winner.
a) We can play individually (b) Maybe it is better to play as a great team
(c) But “business are business” … Maybe the best option and the challenge is to identify that we need to collaborate with each other and compete when the right time arrives.
Figure 7 - The challenge is to identify when to collaborate and when to compete.
“The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the other seeks someone whom he can assist: a good conversation thus originates.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Apophthegms and Interludes - Beyond Good and Evil
MAIN CONSIDERATION – DSPs SHOULD DEFINE THEIR DISAGGREGATION TOLERANCE LEVEL (DTL)
At this point it is necessary to make a caveat and a clarification. DSPs are not uniform entities, on the contrary, they constitute a myriad of individual cases and particular situations. This myriad is determined by differences in some of the following aspects: strategic definitions and business volumes, contexts of regions, countries, markets and competition, technological and partnership strategies, skills, processes, and internal cultures, etc. A clear example of this is different consumption models of open-source tools and level of disaggregation for different DSPs or their technological partnerships and the activities they involve.
If all of the issues discussed above are solved, that we have achieved, industry wide consensus on various initiatives, we have considered a holistic vision, have based our mid-term strategic goals to legacy investments, the CSPs should still choose the appropriate level of disaggregation with which they can easily consume and sustain. This will allow CSPs to achieve a balance between all the dimensions mentioned previously related to disaggregation (innovation cycles, TTM, re-integration efforts, etc.).
This bubbles up the motivation behind this article, that is, what is the appropriate Disaggregation Tolerance Level (DTL) of each DSP, which in our opinion should be based on factors, dependencies and realities discussed in this article.
Figure 8 - CSPs should identify their DTL
Figure 8 illustrates the DTL scale. Depending on the model and DTL chosen, the DSP partner ecosystem is likely to undergo transformation with the primary system integrators taking a more protagonist role, like technology vendors, digital dragons and other members of the ecosystem.
PSI (Primary System Integrators) or Partner ecosystem - In this new model or Future Mode of Operation (FMO) there is probably a change in the tasks that CSPs require from technology vendors/suppliers, with tasks much more related to software integration than to hardware sales. PSIs can offer wrapping and packaging of these disaggregated components towards a holistic full stack frameworks and architectures.
DSPs will have to produce/define a system integrator/partner ecosystem based on this FMO to help them in these integrations and constantly adopt left shift approach on the DTL scale. Currently their usual integration partners very likely will continue to maintain the status quo, rather than taking a transformative approach towards a data-lit cloud-native operations.
FINAL STATEMENT
Finally, all the aforementioned is also directly related to the aspiration (or not) of each CSP to become a DSP that can compete in the new economy derived from the substantial changes that the world is registering, based on the 4th Industrial Revolution and all its immense paradigm changes, like any industrial revolution, but in this case with much faster and deeper changes.
REFERENCES
[1] What is your DTL as CSP or CSP? - Part I. Industry Current Outlook and Problem Description
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Javier Ger – Technical Strategy Architect, Senior Leader, Advisor & Consultant, Teacher & Speaker. Javier has been in the CSPs and ICT industry for more than 20 years, working in tech strategy, architecture, design, planning, and operations of networks and services, leading several projects and teams. He holds an M. Sc degree in Computer Engineering from the Catholic University of Santiago del Estero (Argentina) and a Master's degree in Networks and Communications Systems from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain). Currently, Javier works for Telecom Argentina.
Rajiv Papneja – An accomplished ICT leader driving E2E solutions development leveraging innovative & disruptive technologies. With over 20 years of experience in network transformation, SDNization, and now driving the IT Network transformation initiatives with leading CSPs globally. Rajiv holds a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Executive Leadership Certification from Tuck Business School. Rajiv works as SVP heads the Global Network Services Business Unit at Prodapt.