A revolution is sweeping through the telecommunications world, leading to possibly one of the biggest upheavals in the hundred plus year old industry. Telecommunication networks are migrating from traditional hardware and appliance-centric deployments to cloud-based deployments, with software as the critical component of all network functionality. At the heart of this revolution are two technologies: Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and Software Defined Networking (SDN), both of which aim at virtualizing network applications as well as the network connectivity. Both these technologies, and the interaction between them, have been undergoing trials over the past few years, and new standards as well as architecture options have begun to emerge.

Advanced Programming Interfaces

At one point, application programmable interfaces (APIs) were a nice-to-have capability, but today they are game changers. The pervasiveness of mature digital ecosystems with rich sets of APIs available to developers to build their own digital services has extended beyond the technology industry to the media, financial services, automotive, and health care industries. For communication service providers (CSPs), APIs can open new streams of revenue by monetizing existing network assets in a brokered ecosystem. CSPs should look into evolving the traditional stack to an integrated everything-as-a-service ecosystem and adopt an API-driven delivery model to increase revenue and reduce cost.

Critical Project Solutions Predictions

Our predictions reveal the perspectives gained from hundreds of conversations with industry leaders, and tens of thousands of consumer interviews across the globe. Critical Project Solutions Predictions 2016 are designed to identify critical inflection points that we believe should inform industry strategic thinking, and to explain how we think these will manifest over the next 12–18 months for companies in Technology, Media, Telecommunications (TMT), and other industries.