Major operators continue on their mission to wrest control over next generation network platforms away from vendors. The latest example sees Vodafone and China Mobile leading an initiative to automate the development and deployment of applications across multiple carriers’ networks. This builds on Open Network Automation Protocol (ONAP), the open source system for management and orchestration (MANO) originally developed by AT&T and China Mobile. The latest project reinforces ONAP’s claim to be the dominant orchestration technology for emerging virtualized telco networks. That could be bad news for alternatives, notably ETSI’s Open Source MANO, and for large vendors which remain wedded to the more conventional standards processes, where their power has outweighed that of operators. One reason for that has been…