If you’ve followed this blog or heard anyone from my organization speak in last 18 months, you know we view software as the solution. It’s the solution to deal with dramatic demand curves – 100,000% increase in wireless data traffic between 2007-2014…projected 10X industry traffic growth by 2020. Customized, hardware-based networking hasn’t kept pace with Moore’s Law. We figured out that a software-defined approach was the only approach to take here.
A software-defined network (SDN) is creating new opportunities both internally and for our customers.
When the network is software, you order what you want. You get it in minutes. You can dial it up or down in near real time as your needs change. We call this networking solution Network on Demand. And today we’re expanding the availability our Network on Demand services. We now have agreements with Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Brocade to bring Network on Demand to new businesses and markets.
We’re also unveiling today AT&T Managed Internet Service on Demand. As the name suggests, this new service gives customers the same control of their external Internet connections as Network on Demand does with their internal network connections. AT&T is announcing other news this week, and I invite you to check out att.com/newsroom for more details.
These are great developments in our transformation. We’re out of the planning phase and well into the execution phase. Right now, nobody else is making this pivot as fast as AT&T. We’re reinventing our business. But to make that shift, we have to rethink our culture. We have to become more agile. We have to teach our employees new skills in areas like cybersecurity, big data and more. We’re innovating faster and more strategically at AT&T Labs and the AT&T Foundry. We’re making the network smarter, more flexible and giving it the ability to adapt on its own to surging demand.
Going back to Network on Demand, we can already deploy this up to 95% faster than in the “business as usual” model. We’ve reduced our equipment costs, condensed sales processes, simplified ordering and provisioning, and streamlined global customer support while increasing responsiveness. None of this would be possible if we weren’t thinking like a software company.
We’re still early in this shift, and I’m excited about our path forward. As I’ve noted several times, our goal is to virtualize 75% of our target network architecture by 2020. We’re doing the first 5% this year. There’s a lot more to come. Stay tuned.
