Michael Lazar: “Six years ago, the telecommunications market has changed dramatically”



    The leader of the telecom practice DataArt, formed earlier this year, spoke about the evolution of the telecommunications industry, the transition to open standards and the expansion of the number of providers of communications providers, the opportunities that rapid changes in the market create for IT companies.

    - Is telecom a more or less unified industry, or can it be divided into parts that would be worth considering separately?

    Michael Lazar: - Telecommunications is an area where, on the one hand, there are very strict rules and regulations, and most of the companies working in it are accountable to regulatory organizations. But at the same time, Over-The-Top technologies, for example, Skype, which are not controlled by regulators, are successfully applied here. T. h. The situation is very interesting.

    - Own telecom practice in DataArt appeared only this year. How was it organized?

    M. L .:“We are the youngest of the industrial practices of the company, although by the time of its creation, DataArt managed not only to assemble a strong team of specialists, but also to gain substantial experience in the field of telecommunications. Just until this year, projects or studies of this kind were not merged into a separate practice. I think that the factor that determined the need to declare it as another activity of the company is an evolution that the industry itself has been experiencing in the past few years. This process is associated with the abandonment of the use of proprietary equipment and software and a fundamental change in the closed ecosystem of the industry, which recently consisted of a handful of large providers and their suppliers. It is being replaced by a new environment based on open standards, and in many cases on open source programs.

    About six years ago, telecommunications companies themselves decided to completely rethink their approach to service delivery. They realized that it was necessary to be more versatile and introduce new services much faster than before. This greatly changed the market - then proprietary, custom software and began to yield to common standards and open source software. Today, programs developed by different vendors can easily communicate with each other through an API, and this is a fundamental shift. At the same time, virtualization of network functions, which is widely used in other areas, has recently arrived in telecommunications. The industry was convinced that the requirements for performance, reliability, sustainability, the very complexity of the environments here are such that no standard commercial solutions out of the box can be applied.

    Now the industry itself is going through a period of fundamental change, and we are fortunate to be part of this process. We work with ETSI NFV - the working group of virtualization of network functions of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Actually, we are engaged in the development of new standards. And for DataArt, just at this stage in the development of the industry, enormous opportunities arise - all companies are now concentrating on open standards and source codes, on the speed at which new products are brought to the market. As a result, instead of a small group of suppliers, a new system is being created, consisting of many companies offering new generation solutions. And the providers themselves look differently at the end-user service.

    —What is telecom practice in DataArt now doing?

    M. L .:“First of all, we need to create a name for ourselves in the industry, concentrating our efforts on several key areas. I have already talked about working with ETSI NFV. We are part of a safety standards committee. We already have experience, now we need a reputation - the industry should know that DataArt has accumulated considerable knowledge in the field of telecommunications, and now we are actively talking about it.
    An equally important and valuable part of the industry is the Over-The-Top (OTT) segment, which has hundreds of software vendors who constantly offer new services. We work with them, choosing companies that we believe are entering the OTT market with outstanding ideas.

    At the end of last year, we participated in TAD Summit, an international conference of software developers for the telecom industry. And in this we hold TAD Hack - a hackathon on the basis of our three centers: in Voronezh, Kiev and New York. You can say this is the exact opposite of cooperation with ESTI. TAD Hack is a story about a skilled programmer who once finds a phenomenal solution. The industry seeks to unite these two completely different styles - this is the evolution of the next technological cycle.

    We have successfully completed several projects and are now focused on larger-scale transactions. Our partners include several telecommunication companies and very large OTT software providers.

    - Is it possible to consider telecommunications as an area especially difficult for work?

    M. L .:- Everything that we do in telecom is noticeably more complicated than operations common to other industries, simply because of the environment in which we work. This is partly determined by the regulators, and partly by the problem of the interaction of various devices and systems. When you make a phone call to Japan, you hardly think that in order for the conversation to take place, there are a lot of complicated processes somewhere - the phones just work. But there is also billing and operational support systems.

    At the top of the entire infrastructure are OTT applications that successfully use it. They destroy the industry in its former form - and this is good, because it forces it to move forward, and the participants in the process move more actively.

    - In principle, communication operators are conservative?

    M. L .:- Very conservative! But, as I said, the situation began to change several years ago, and now they themselves are waiting for real progress. Some companies are moving faster, but in principle, everything changes. The main was the desire to quickly bring to the market new services. Indeed, in other industries, companies sometimes offer something new every week, and taking into account the use of cloud technologies and virtualization, this no longer looks fantastic. In telecom, if a company manages to create a service in less than a year, it is a success. The most persistent bring the product to the market in six months. But the majority so far exists within the framework of 18-month cycles. In this case, the goal is already indicated - to offer new items with the speed of Google or Apple in time, which is calculated in weeks. If you ask what kind of new services in telecommunications we are talking about, this will be the most important question. The fact is that no one knows the answer to it yet! But the industry is already preparing the infrastructure to support these as yet unknown new products and implement all the most incredible ideas, no matter who they come from.

    Suppose you are going to watch a football championship, and you want interactive viewing. You want to watch matches on your smart TV and at the same time support a videoconference with friends and relatives who are in different countries. Of course, you can connect the broadcast and simultaneously communicate with them through the selected application. But one day there will be a service that will offer you to use both functions at once, for this its creators need to agree with the content provider - in this case, paid. While this service does not exist. But for the business of such products, you can come up with even a million. The main thing is that the infrastructure allows you to launch a new service, simply by updating the software.

    Now the telecommunications companies' suppliers ecosystem remains relatively small, but companies are also trying to buy from new suppliers, so they are trying to make it more open. At the same time, they are faced with the problems of security, reliability and sustainability of their systems. If today someone’s web-conferencing application downloaded from the Apple Store stops working, no one will call it a disaster. But if the same thing happens with a service released by AT & T or British Telecom, the reaction will be much more painful - after all, everyone automatically expects that the products of such companies will work with the reliability of a home phone. Telecom has long been known for the reliability level of "five nines" and - that is, 99.999%. For example, in the world of cable modems and mobile phones, it is in principle impracticable. But consumers are still waiting that everything produced by telecommunications companies will be more reliable than any other products. This is a punishment for the fact that communication companies have worked so well for so long!

    - Is it easy for industry representatives to experience the current evolution?

    M. L .:- The process started due to the desire of providers for independence from their own suppliers and the desire to quickly bring new services to the market. Eight years ago, the replacement of infrastructure would have cost you millions of dollars, and in the end you would be tightly connected with your equipment supplier. You would hardly be able to respond if another supplier offered an innovative technology to the market, which you would like to use - you could only contact your former partner. Not to mention the moment when you would have to upgrade. Installing any new service, be it video conferencing, fast connection, firewall, or virtual connection to other locations — everything that a business usually needs — required the appearance of supplier specialists in your centers. Failure of these trips also reduces costs and time needed to start. We can say that top managers are now very pleased with the opportunity to save money of their companies.

    Inside the telecom, it was decided that depending on the suppliers is ridiculous. And the providers demanded that the manufacturers themselves open the system to new players. The demand was accompanied by an explanation: providers pay such money that, if they do not meet them halfway, with their budgets they will find a new way on their own. This is a great motivation for suppliers to cooperate.
    But, despite all the advantages of new technologies, it is necessary to take into account the requirements of regulators, complexity, performance problems and system reliability. Now we are seeing a movement towards open standards, virtualization and the use of standard equipment out of the box.

    - Does virtualization of network functions in telecommunications differ from this process in other industries?

    M. L .:“This is not just the deployment of workloads on virtual servers or the transfer of their databases to them.” Telecom is in the process of virtualization of the entire service chain, consisting of many components. In general, the industry can be divided into three parts: NFV - network function virtualization - network functions virtualization, SDN - software-defined networks, MANO - Management and Orchestration - administration and orchestration. Each of the three large sections has hundreds of components. Another extremely important aspect is the operation of operating support and billing systems.

    There is a course of action built over the past hundred years, and technological problems are inevitable. Nobody usually thinks about the technology of communication systems. With virtualization, everything works differently, and when you stop ordering equipment and software, the number of calls becomes even greater. A simple example is the “noisy neighbor” problem. It happens in other industries - you know, sometimes the processes that are running for other tasks affect yours. But in telecom it is fraught with equipment breakdowns, failures in security systems and chain falls. Quality of service, reliable support of the service and accurate calculation of the architecture are a critical issue for everything to just work!

    - Does this mean that a particularly high level of knowledge is now required of engineers in telecom?

    M. L .:“Definitely, but in a somewhat unusual sense.” Each of them now needs to understand much better how the whole system works, that is, to have a wider outlook. At the same time, effective work often involves a fairly narrow specialization. Our engineers are technically very competent, they are able to perfectly do their part of the work, but it can be difficult for them to expand their knowledge enough to cover the entire chain of solution creation.

    - Do developers need to better understand how the telecommunications industry works from a business point of view?

    M. L .:- The business itself is now changing, but the idea of ​​faster customer service while reducing transaction costs is not new. In principle, technical specialists already understand much better how all this fits into the business, and, of course, those who manage the processes are well aware of how the industry as a whole works. In general, I think the peculiarity of telecom is that most of the top managers here are people with very good technical knowledge. Not necessarily at the level of general directors, but to meet a senior vice president or executive vice president, able to discuss in detail the engineering details of the project, here you can very often. Almost all of them started just in the technical field and are very deeply versed in technology. In other industries, this is not a common phenomenon. And technicians now tend to

    - Do people involved in telecommunications have room for the experiment?
    M. L.: - Yes! Now almost any task can be solved in several ways. And companies just continue to experiment with different approaches in search of the optimal solution. At the same time, they need help at every stage - from creating a system to testing it - right now we are communicating with partners a lot about how to conduct tests. We need to understand how to make tests reproducible, how to interpret results, how to use the information obtained in business. The whole industry is in constant motion.

    Now we are working with two partner companies on organizing discussions on automatic testing of systems at the summit, which will be held in October. It is primarily about the problems of interoperability and performance. Previously, providers did not have to think about the ability of devices to interact - they simply bought equipment from one supplier. Now we need to determine which tests will suit all market participants, while they must comply with the new architecture, and we must be able to support them in the future. And, most importantly, tests must be reproducible.

    Also popular now: