Author’s Note: There’s a lot of talk and plenty of noise related to NFV in the telecom industry. It’s a time of market transformation with many executives and marketers making claims for how their companies are doing NFV better than others, or how they are ahead of the competition in one or more ways. I think we are missing an important voice: The CTOs. I am talking with my peers from service providers and suppliers to get a sense of what is real. I am sharing these conversations in this series called The Real CTOs of NFV. The title is fun but the intent is serious. Following is my fifth Real CTO conversation with Jason Koenders of Integra.
Prayson: Jason, I appreciate you joining me today and if you could, just start off talking a little about your company and its role in the whole NFV transformation.
Jason: Integra's role is to best use both new and existing technologies for the benefit of our customers, shareholders and employees. We've been watching the discussion and development that is taking place with SDN and NFV for the last three or so years and the many contributors that have been involved throughout the industry. There has been and continues to be a strong community around the development of these technologies. As with any new technology, Integra thoroughly vets it to ensure that it will enable us to continue to improve our performance, primarily in four key areas.
First is security — security for both our network and our customers' services.
Next, simplification of the network, which assists both the operations team and the ongoing maintenance to the network. As you know, Integra comprises multiple companies, including Electric Lightwave and Eschelon, so we have multiple networks that make up what is the Integra network. We are using the technologies to simplify it as we go forward.
I'd say the third key area of performance is speed of service delivery. We want to deliver our customer services in real time. Now, there are some long poles in the tent, including fiber builds. As you know Prayson, the time required for permitting for builds is one of those inherent challenges that we'll probably never be able to get over. But our focus is enabling our technology to continue to increase the speed of delivery, especially when we already have connectivity to customers.
And then I would say the final key area for performance is scalability of the network, ensuring that we continue to firmly build on our solid foundation, starting at our dense fiber assets and building up.
Beyond performance, my technology team is always looking to improve to economics in our network both from a CapEx and OpEx view. My vision is that we will achieve these objectives by being as open as possible, and by clearly articulating additional use cases to our vendor community such as ADVA, and using those solutions to deliver the best experience to the customer.
We'll position Integra as a fast follower in the next couple of years, with an eye on becoming a leader in the industry.
Prayson: Jason, you mentioned a very interesting point that is developing or supporting both the physical and the virtual worlds. There are no greenfields, and to deploy these new technologies is going to take understanding how they can co-exist with the existing technologies. Would you say that's the biggest obstacle that you have to deploying NFV or would it be potentially some of the internal barriers like organization and training?
Jason: When you're talking about the obstacles, I would say that there are several foundational pieces that we have to have prior to deployment including infrastructure (including network) compute and storage. Integra is deploying multiple service provider data centers that will be based on automation and open standards enabling additional resiliency and reliability in a format that's both modular and scalable.
The next obstacle is probably the organization. As you know Integra has formed one technology team with the engineering and IT functions reporting to me. This is something that many of my counterparts and I have been pushing for some time now. I've been fortunate enough to have a CEO and a board of directors that see the vision of where the technology is going to take us, and understand that the combined skills of these organizations will enable us to get there.
The other obstacle I would mention is consolidating the legacy network with the new technologies. Along with that is the OSS/BSS challenge, where we’re still early in the vetting those challenges regarding utilizing our existing systems or needing to implement new or additional systems. OSS and BSS migration is one of the areas that I think both the industry and Integra are looking toward.
Prayson: You hit a couple of really good topics, Jason. I'm starting to see more and more meetings with our customers where there'll be a cross functional team present, including people from engineering and IT as well as from operations. But your team in Integra is one of the few where I have seen an actual organizational change in place to support a change in thinking. I think that's an important step that you have taken. Were there any surprises with the teams coming into one?
Jason: There are surprises every day when you have a team as big as we are. But I would say that the teams have rallied around integration. We gave the employees the vision of where we're headed with the technology. We wanted to be upfront on this, and because of that there is now so much backing by the employees. And, that gives them passion because they're working on meaningful projects.
It's helping build a stronger Integra and the teams have really come together. People want to work on the latest and greatest technologies, and want to be a part of something great. It’s both rewarding and fun to be a part of this effort.
I wouldn't say that we have the perfect organizational structure today with everybody firmly aligned, but the organization continues to evolve and our people are engaged.
Prayson: I have seen see some of the results of that engagement in the discussions I've had with your teams.
You also mentioned the OSS/BSS challenge. I think that's going to be a huge issue. People are struggling with whether they can make their existing systems work in this new world or if they're going to throw them all out. Have you come to a conclusion yet on that question?
Jason: No. We are still early on in that process, and it’s going to be a challenge for us. In some respects we want to hold on to the old, but we don't want that philosophy to limit our future possibilities. And you know that replacing an OSS/BSS that's a huge, huge undertaking.
Prayson: Agreed. Given the state of the art and where you're at, when do you think that NFV will hit critical mass for carrier-class networks?
Jason: Let's start by limiting the scope to Integra's carrier-class network. As a major regional fiber provider, we're strong in the western part of the US. We have network assets that are foundational to providing a positive customer experience.
That said, our industry, along with assistance from companies traditionally outside of our industry, has invested much time into the success of these technologies. There's no question of the benefits that these investments will have in our industry, and which consist of improved performance, reduced cost and reduction of delivery time frame. I see the future of most of our new product development initiatives will be delivered via a virtualized software application.
All of my counterparts in the industry intend to deploy these technologies in the future. It’s only of a question of when. If there is a service provider that's not looking to deploy these technologies, I would say that service provider will have significant revenue challenges facing over the long term.
We are at a critical mass today — critical mass being the minimum size of something we need to start or maintain.
Prayson: You said we’re reaching critical mass now. Will we see roll out next year, or is it really 2017 before we see scale?
Jason: I would say that we'll start to see some scale in 2016 for some service providers. But if you're asking about a majority of service providers I would say that's 2017.
Prayson: I like your observation that somebody who's not looking at virtualization and cloudification in general are going to be revenue challenged. I would agree with that statement.
As you’re looking into NFV and starting to investigate how it will play out, including those aspects of organization and knowledge and OSS and BSS, what’s the one thing that's been most surprising or unexpected?
Jason: Maybe it’s not a surprise but it's really not about NFV for our customers. Integra cares about our customers’ business. We're committed to delivering the best services that the industry has to offer, from working with customers on personalized solutions to ongoing account maintenance and future business planning.
At the end of the day, it's about the functionality the customer is receiving. Is what Integra delivers to the customer what the customer expects? Does the service we are providing have all the features and functionality they require, not only to do their business, but to enable them to be more productive? Does the service have the inherent reliability that they have come to expect from Integra? That is one of the benefits of NFV, to improve reliability through the layers of the abstraction.
The customer wants his or her service to be delivered faster. They want to make sure it's priced competitively or even at a reduced cost. But then again, none of these is unexpected right?
Prayson: If I understand what you're saying it's that you're coming at NFV not from a technology focus but from the standpoint of how it impacts your customer, in terms of getting the services that they want when they want them.
Jason: Absolutely right. It's all about what you’re delivering to your customers, and how you're enabling yourself to deliver that better for the customers.
Prayson: Well I think that's exactly the right viewpoint. People lose that focus on the customer. They lose sight of the fact that they're not in the NFV business; they’re in the service business. It’s all about what the customers want and need, and giving it to them faster.
Speaking of going faster — a lot of people are talking about making very aggressive moves into virtualization. AT&T has announced its Domain 2.0 program, but it's very difficult to change the course of a very large company like an AT&T or Verizon.
As a mid-sized operator, do you feel like it gives you an advantage to be able to move faster and roll out these advantages to your customers before the big guys?
Jason: There are obvious advantages to being as you so elegantly put it, a mid-sized operator. I like to think of Integra as a strong regional provider. The obvious advantage is size, limited to a region where we can deploy new technologies and innovation with fewer resources.
However, size isn't the only advantage we've created for ourselves. The technology team in Integra has also architected the network for quicker go-to-market, and the ability to build on that foundation and then scale as the new technologies come on board. Hopefully we continue to have a little bit of foresight and are building the network appropriately.
But it would certainly be a miss if I didn't mention our dedicated employees and skill set that we have internally at Integra. I would certainly put a checkmark in that box, for a competitive advantage to Integra.
Prayson: Could you say more about how you architected your network for speed and scale?
Jason: It’s everything that we do. It’s those foundational pieces. When we're putting the fiber in the ground, making sure that we're not just building a lateral to a building, but that it's just going to pick up multiple buildings along the way.
From a service architecture standpoint, it's looking at everything that’s enabling us to build upon it like Legos or building blocks, where customers can add additional services without impact to their current service. I would say it’s inherent in everything that we do.
Prayson: I want to bring up a subject that is hot right now: licensing and commercialization. There’s a lot of talk about NFV changing the way service providers will pay for new technology when they are no longer locked-in to a hardware or software supplier. How will Integra take advantage of this opportunity?
Jason: First, Integra will take advantage of the new software models by using some open source applications where it makes sense and it is the right solution for our customers. That said, I also look forward to working with our vendor community to use new commercial models to develop applications that drive deep value for our customers. It is the partnerships that we’ve seen collaborating on this technology that will continue to advance these concepts and create more value for the entire supply chain from vendor to service provider to customer.
The new technology and commercial models also enable Integra to be more nimble, whether it’s migrating customers to a more feature-rich application that serves the same purpose, or making a decision to sunset an application more quickly due to its success or lack thereof.
Prayson: Jason, we do appreciate your time and insights today. I think that your service provider viewpoints are very interesting, especially about the combining the engineering and IT teams, and the emphasis on the customer.
Jason: Thank you, and I look forward to us connecting again here in the near future.
Prayson: Yes, same here.