As noted, in the early years of an open platform, there is considerable complexity in integrating unfamiliar products and vendors. Though the end goal is an automated, plug-and-play multivendor environment, it will take a long time to achieve that at a level that brings confidence for operators to deploy the new systems in their central networks. For now, there is a major opportunity for systems integrators to pull together equipment and software from multiple suppliers, some of them small companies with limited integration and roll-out capabilities of their own; and to tune and optimize those systems to work optimally with common cloud infrastructure (that has been a major challenge for Rakuten and its integrators, Cisco and TecMahindra). A major TechM…