In recent research with 14 vendors providing telco automation, I was struck by some of the phrases used by those interviewed.
5 of them nicely summed up the current state of progress:
| Phrases used | Translation |
| “automation is a journey” | automation is difficult but necessary |
| “random acts of automation” | most telcos currently lack a big-picture automation strategy |
| “Byzantine and unusable” | significant technical and organisational complexity hampers deployments – including fragmentation of automations, multiple vendors, data quality and broken processes |
| “heroic actions in the past” | Initiatives such as ONAP were designed to provide a platform to support telco automation – but encountered barriers to success |
| “lots of standards to choose from” | the complexity of automations, particularly in the network, requires a significant amount of industry collaboration and work to overcome issues such as the lack of integration between multiple vendors |
