The mobile telecommunications sector in the European Union is expanding rapidly owing to a favorable technological and regulatory environment. The increasingly competitive market structure delivers lower prices and better service quality to consumers. However, serving at the same quality for the software-oriented products is not an easy process. Consumers, used to high performance and novelty in the industry, may react to late trendy product launches by potentially reducing their resources to the sector. From the point of view of market welfare, it may be well worth the increased risk given the huge benefits consumers receive as a result of competition. There may be public interest in sustaining the growth of this industry and by taking actions that encourage agents to the long-term view.
As the telecom space moves towards increased use of virtualization platforms, DevOps is becoming an important model to smooth the transition. Telecommunications companies are increasingly adopting DevOps as the next logical step in rolling out an agile approach across the enterprise. While it may be difficult to, in execution it aims to unify development and operations teams and their practices, tools and organizational cultures so that the IT organizations can quickly deliver optimal services, best meet the needs of their internal and external customers, and foster innovation. DevOps is seen as the combination of software development best practices with network operations. Historically, changes in network operations unfolded over decades; whereas changes in IT software environments is considered more agile. Combining development with operations is expected to allow network changes to occur without risking security, reliability and performance.
The old telecom model, in which services are launched from the top-down through large bureaucratic planning processes and then built by adding complicated, vertical technology systems, is not sufficiently fast to meet the market demand of new features. In the future, most services will be launched with software. That is the promise of software-defined networking (SDN) and the reason that the entire industry is moving toward it. By creating an underlying infrastructure of open, commodity-based hardware, it will enable software-based services to be conceived and launched much faster. In short, it will enable DevOps-style management.
Telecommunications companies have traditionally separated developers and operations teams into their own silos, where they can put their heads down and focus on whatever work they have in front of them. DevOps turns that model upside down, forcing developers and operations to sit next to each other while working on an application. Telecom companies have tools that have been in place for decades, which are now dated. New, more complex tools need to be learned by both developers and operations. These skills will require workers to have more general abilities, crossing disciplines in order to work with their new partners. This is where the efficiencies of the DevOps model are realized, where one consequence is that some workers might not adapt fast enough, and will be left behind. These fundamental changes are not yet fully exploited and explored, and there are many difficult areas to manage in such a fast pace work environment – and for the products that are expected to be autonomous in many aspects. The transformation is not an easy change.
The problem owners in this category are Ericsson Sweden, Turkcell Teknoloji and Ericsson Turkey.