While our natural desire to see and experience new places has been so abruptly curtailed, our thirst for knowledge is as strong as ever. This week’s Layer123 World Congress attracted a sizeable online crowd to catch up on the latest developments in, well, just about everything at the IT/Telecom interface: SDN, NFV, Orchestration, Automation, Edge, 5G (of course). There was competition from week 2 (or is it 3?) of the TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World, the Broadband World Forum, and a new Open RAN Forum to name just a few. So if you joined one of those others, what did you miss at L123WC? Here’s a rundown of Layer123, from A to Z: A – Automation. While fast becoming a term that is meaningless without some qualification, greater automation is a stated goal for most virtualization programs presented at Layer123. Orange’s Emmanuel Bidet reminded the audience that “automation does not come for free”, and that a route must be navigated between its benefits and the extra complexity that it can introduce. Liberty Global sidestepped the automation vs jobs elephant by framing automation as necessary for coping with a massively increased rate of change on networks. (By contrast, Deutsche Telekom offered a straight “fewer people” benefit […]