DevOps Telco: An Oxymoron?

Abstract

As the telco industry is starting to go down the path of virtualization and software defined everything, then they start hitting the same walls that the IT companies have hit almost 10 years ago—the walls to _real_ agility. The walls are in many places: in the technology stack, in the organizational setup and, what is the most difficult to change, in habits of people. This paper provides a short version of the story behind the transformation to real agility in IT, as well as general areas of needed change, when implementing it. Additional information on how to approach DevOps in Telcos is provided, related to the fact that their today’s business is predominantly standardized and their software is not produced by themselves.