Exploring the Telecoms Future Today
At the core of ECT is a research and development team concentrating on emerging technologies and markets potentially of interest to CSPs. We follow leading industry analysts and review their telecoms forecasts. For instance, we consult with Gartner on selected technologies and services in Gartner’s priority matrices, especially those that are forecasted to be adopted in the next 1 to 5 years with transformational or high impact on our industry. We also collaborate with our customers, third-party vendors and partners, discussing which innovations they are exploring. All of this flows into the backlog of our internal agile R & D sprints and user testing. We make the results of these efforts available to all CSPs participating in our Joint Agile Product Development Program. Whenever we and our customers are convinced of the benefits of the respective innovation, it is then in some way incorporated into our T-LCAP and/or new Packaged Business Capabilities.
What is our R&D working on this year?
Earlier this year, we investigated and evaluated third-party vendors in monitoring, observability and cloud operations. As a result, we integrated our T-LCAP with Grafana for monitoring, Grafana Loki for logging and Prometheus for data presentation.
In regards to telecoms network architecture and integration, we’ve continued to augment the list of VNF Managers, with which our VNFs integrate for lifecycle management. Containerization, e.g. with Kubernetes, was implemented, a technology important for edge computing in 5G. Regarding the latter, next on our plan is an examination of containerization and workers for edge functionality in content delivery networks.
On the application technology layer, we launched our two Application Development Tools for the Citizen and Professional Developers. In the upcoming months, we’re planning to look into customer journey analytics, citizen integrator tools, API/PBC marketplaces, conversational AI and microservices.
As far as new market opportunities are concerned, this year is all about conversational platforms and composable applications. Next in line is visual collaboration.
Many of the topics we explore with our clients flow into our white papers, two-pagers, presentations and e-books, which you can find here. Please tell us what you would like to explore with us!