If you haven’t yet read the Innovator’s Dilemma, you should. This seminal book by Clayton Christensen is now approaching its 20th anniversary and is as relevant as ever. It analyzes the hair pulling difficulties that incumbents face in embracing disruptive technologies that can reshape industries and shift the balance of power between newcomers and themselves.

Microsoft is central to three classic examples. They grabbed the PC software market from IBM, very nearly ceded the Internet browser market to Netscape, and then by ignoring search engines until it was too late, ignominiously lost the Internet advertising market to Google.

Every network operations center (NOC) manager dreams of the day when he or she can relax on the beach without worrying about monitoring or maintaining their network. Or, more realistically, NOC managers are waiting for the day that they can put the network on autopilot, freeing up their time and resources for more ‘meaningful’ tasks.

As apparent in the OPNFV summit held a couple months ago, network functions virtualization (NFV) is taking off in terms of popularity. While, the growing interest hasn’t quite been translated into widespread deployment, the underlying concept is obviously building a very wide and diverse fan base. Along with the interest, the list of potential and real inhibitors also keeps growing.

The current state of the mobile network isn’t as clean as you might hope, as marketers push the benefits of the latest and greatest 4G LTE technology and upcoming 5G capabilities. In fact, adapting to the mobile network evolution is a messy proposition that even the most advanced service providers can struggle with.

Despite the flashy promises of advanced 4G LTE and 5G networks, service providers must find more effective ways to improve service quality across multi-generation mobile networks.

The first Big Communications Event related blog focused on Virtualization and Security. In this entry, the focus is on the other hot topics at the show, specifically Automation and Disaggregation.

In my last blog post, I considered two questions: what does a control plane really do, and what does a forwarding device really look like? Before continuing to our final destination—a better understanding of what an SDN is, and what the fuss is all about—we need to back up to the first post in this series, and reexamine the question of centralization and decentralization.