By Grant Lenahan Appledore Research Group attended SDN & OpenFlow World Congress held in Swissotel Dusseldorf Germany October 12 – 16 2015. We had the opportunity to meet with Axel Clauberg of Deutsche Telekom, David Amzallag of Vodafone, Shawn Hakl of Verizon, Steven Wright Chair of ETSI NFV ISG, and others including all of the major suppliers. As CSPs prepare to move from the basics of virtualizing a network instance to operationalizing the NFV and SDN infrastructure a key theme to the promise of agility and OPEX cost savings was echoed at the show. DT, Vodafone and ALU proclaimed that operations is as important as or more important than the technology itself. Vodafone’s main topic was in fact “operations driven transformation”. ALU supported this theme with a focus on how to make technology open and interoperable (key operational goals) and DT emphasized duality of the technological promise, balanced against the more limited reality in large part due to the immaturity of the operations/management stack. DT’s Axel Clauberg gave the open source and open-interface movement a huge vote of support, in the face of all the challenges, by explaining how DT cannot, in the most mission critical parts of its network, […]