As the proverb has it: “if you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, take a friend”. The automation journey is too far, and too important, for CSPs to tackle alone, argues Grant Lenahan. Automation is Complex, Layered, & Costly. It’s a Journey. Automation in telecom holds wonderful promise, but it is also complex and costly. Many of tomorrow’s network tech and services depend on automation; not just the obvious datacenter workloads, but dynamic technologies like 5G & network slices. Finally, automation is essential for practical, agile innovation. In telecom the variety of things to be automated is vast: unlike traditional IT workloads in datacenters, telecom demands proximity[1], specialized infrastructure configurations, and complex configuration of 100s of 1000s or even millions of paying customers and customers services on that infrastructure. Automation is therefore a journey. There are endless tasks to be automated in the evolving network and its many services, and each will benefit from near-endless improvement and refinement. In the end, few, if any, CSPs can single-handedly afford to single-handedly shoulder this investment. Moreover, if they could, why would they, when lower-cost, more complete alternatives are possible? Telecom has been on an automation journey […]