A constant theme in my surfing lessons this summer was the importance of understanding rip currents (water from incoming waves exiting a beach) and what to do if caught in one. An olympic swimmer can’t beat the speed of a rip current: fight the current and you will drown. By contrast an expert surfer (not me) will use a rip current to rapidly move to a good surf location; a non expert should swim tangentially to escape its grip. This felt like a good analogy for the way Telcos are currently tackling NFV and the cloud. Telcos in continuing to focus on platform high availability are fighting against the rip current of cloud. They need to work with the cloud to achieve the benefits of network virtualization. The challenge of fighting, rather than working with cloud, was highlighted for me in a recent webinar by Windriver with BT on the challenges of vCPE and Openstack. The six challenges identified are all very real, but their positioning in terms of the need for the cloud (Openstack) to become ‘carrier grade’ and enable 5 9s felt like a missed opportunity for new thinking. The focus on a distinct ‘carrier need’ framed the question to inevitably create an answer that is a ‘virtualized’ replica […]