One of the interesting contrasts at the recent Layer123 Zero Touch Automation conference in Madrid was the juxtaposition of the work being undertaken by the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) project and the MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) project; presented on the preliminary day of the conference. With its Madrid location OSM, and its key sponsor Telefonica, were bound to feature heavily. OSM is now 2 years old, has over 90 members and is approaching its 4th release of code. Throughout the morning there were many presentations on what OSM could achieve and on various proof of concepts that it was being used in. For me, what was missing was any real use of OSM in actual products within Telcos or externally with others. The Proof of Concepts still felt like early stage internal, engineering views of what an NFV product should be, rather than something a customer would buy and use. “We will require 3 times as many software developers in the future from what we have today.” – Telefonica I’m sure the intention of this quote, given at the conference, was to highlight how Telefonica was transforming into a software-oriented organisation. However, it also felt like an indication of how […]