The ONF may just have done something very smart. It’s been clear for at least a decade that operators want to buy products rather than just endorsing standards, but how do the products develop in an open-source world where no single player fields a total solution? The ONF says that the answer to that is ONF Marketplace. The concept has a lot of merit, but it’s still not completely clear that the ONF will cover the whole network-ecosystem waterfront, and that might be an issue.
For decades there’s been a growing disconnect between how we produce technology and how we consume it. Technology is productized, meaning that there are cohesive functional chunks of work that are turned into “applications” and sold. Rarely do companies or people consume things this way. Instead, they create work platforms by combining the products. Microsoft Office is a great example of such a platform. When technology is “platformized” like this, the natural symbiosis between the products builds a greater value for the whole.
The same thing happens in the consumer space. Consumers don’t care about network technology, they care about experiences, and so consumer broadband offerings have to be experience platforms. They have to deliver what the consumer wants, handle any issues in delivery quality quickly and cheaply, and evolve to support changes in consumer expectations or available experiences. It’s not just pushing bits around.
In networks, platforms for work or experience are created by integrating all the network, hosting, and management technologies needed.
Historically, networks were built by assembling products, and to maximize their profits, vendors also produced related products that created the entire network ecosystem. When you bought routers from Cisco, for example, you’d get not only routers but management systems and related tools essential in making a bunch of routers into a router network. That goal—making routers into router networks—is the same goal we have today, but with open components and startups creating best-of-breed products, it’s not as easy.
Look at a virtualization-based or even white-box solution today. You get the boxes from Vendor A, the platform software for the white boxes from Vendor B, the actual network/router software from Vendor C. Then you have to ask where the operations and management tools come from. The problem is especially acute if you’ve decided on a major technology shift, something like SDN. Traditional operations/management tools probably won’t even work. How do you convert products to platform?
The ONF Marketplace is at least an attempt to bridge the product/platform gap. If you establish a set of standards or specifications and certify against them, and if you also align them to be symbiotic, buyers would have more confidence that getting a certified solution would mean getting an integrated, complete, solution.
The fly in the ointment is the notion of an “integrated, complete, solution”. There are really three levels of concern with regard to the creation and sustaining of a complete transformation ecosystem. Does the ONF Marketplace address them all, and if not, is what’s not part of the deal critical enough to threaten the goal overall?
The ONF has four suites in its sights at the moment; Aether, Stratum, SEBA and VOLTHA. Aether is a connectivity-as-a-service model linked to mobile (4G and 5G) networking. Stratum is a chip-independent white-box operating system, SEBA is a virtual-based PON framework for residential/business broadband and mobile backhaul, and VOLTHA is a subset of SEBA aimed at OpenFlow control of PON optics. One thing that stands out here is that all of these missions are very low-level; there’s nothing about management and little about transformation of IP through support of alternative routing—either in “new-router” or “new-routing” form.
The ONF does have a vision for programmable IP networks, based on OpenFlow and SDN, but as I’ve noted in prior blogs, the concept doesn’t have a lot of credibility outside the data center because of SDN controller scalability and availability fears. There is really no vision at a higher level, no management framework, no OSS/BSS, and nothing that really ties these initiatives to a specific business case. That all raises some critical questions.
The first is whether transformation is even possible without transforming IP. Operators don’t think so; I can’t remember any conversation I’ve had with an operator in the last five years that didn’t acknowledge the need to change how the IP layer was built and managed. I think that makes it clear that the only players who will be able to transform anything above or below IP will have to start with an IP strategy.
In a left-handed way, that might explain why transformation has been so difficult. The logical players to transform the IP layer would be the incumbents there, and of course those incumbents have no incentive to redesign the network so as to reduce operator spending on their products. Any non-incumbents have to fight against entrenched giants to get traction, which is never easy.
The second question is whether something like ONF Marketplace could elevate itself to consider the infrastructure, network, and hosting management issues. Maybe, but right now the initiative is focused on the ONF’s own work, the specifications it’s developed. The ONF has no position in the management space, nothing to build on. Would they be willing to at least frame partnerships above their own stuff, and then certify them in their marketplace?
Then there’s the key question, which is whether a marketplace is really a way to assemble a transformational ecosystem. An ecosystem has to be characterized by three factors. First, it has to be functionally complete, covering all the technical elements needed to make a complete business case. Second, it has to be fully integrated so that it can be deployed as a single package, without a lot of incremental tuning through professional services. Otherwise, buyers can’t really be sure it’s going to work. Finally, it has to offer specific and credible sponsorship, some player whose credibility is sufficient to make the concept itself credible. How does the ONF Marketplace concept fare in these areas?
It’s not functionally complete. There’s no credible IP strategy at this point, and nothing but open sky above. It is fully integrated within its scope, but because it’s not complete the level of integration of the whole (which isn’t available to judge at this point) can’t be assessed. But what it does have is specific and credible sponsorship. The ONF has done a lot of good stuff, even in the IP area where it’s taking a lead in programmable control-plane behavior, a key to new services.
From this, I think we can make a judgement on the ONF Marketplace concept. If that concept can be anchored at the IP level, either by fixing the SDN-centric view the ONF has now or by admitting to other IP-layer approaches in some way, then the concept can work. In fact, it might be a prototype for how we could create a transformed network model, and sell it to buyers who are among the most risk-adverse in all the world.
I hope the ONF thinks about all of this. They’ve done good work below IP, particularly with Stratum and P4, but they need to get the key piece of the puzzle in place somehow. If they do, they could raise themselves above the growing number of organizations who plan to do something to drive the network of the future. If they do that, they might keep us from getting stuck in the present.