There is a growing fear in the industry that institutional knowledge is dying off, as the most experienced workers retire or jump ship, while their replacements have come of age in an era where black-box appliances are the new normal – rather than the complex systemic understanding of network functionality, studied at universities and honed by getting their hands dirty. Of course, it is not as clear-cut a divide as this. There are shades between these binaries, but the fear these operators express can be traced back to decisions made long ago to essentially outsource R&D to the vendor community. This put much of the development onus on the vendors, and in turn, allowed the operators to reduce their expenditure.…