AT&T has made considerable waves in the mobile industry by shaking up its supply chain, adopting aggressive roadmaps for software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization, and even placing key technology developments into open source, notably its ECOMP management and orchestration (MANO) software, now the basis of the ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) platform, hosted by the Linux Foundation. All this highlights how the operator of the future could look. It will have a dramatically different cost base, relying heavily on open source and multivendor technologies as well as software rather than proprietary hardware. But that openness means additional resource and work is needed inhouse (or via integrators) to make open source platforms fully optimal for the demanding processes of telecoms…