The sort of progress seen at AT&T, with its Domain 2.0 SDN program, is important to show others what can be done, but it does not make a fully-fledged market delivering huge revenues to suppliers. That is going to require the three essentials outlined above, and this week saw AT&T partnering with Orange to try to accelerate the process. The two companies aim to accelerate the availability of interoperable NFV/SDN systems and so to improve their own economics and assert leadership of how this critical platform evolves. This is a role several other operators are chasing, notably by submitting their MANO (management and orchestration) specifications to industry groups as potential de facto standards (China Mobile’s OPEN-O or Telefonica’s OpenMANO are…