Keynote speaker: Ramesh Nagarajan

Chief Innovation Director in the Communication, Media and Technology operating unit of Accenture (US).


Title: Agile Operating Model for a Software Driven World.

Abstract:

As service providers transition to a software defined world, they still retain all the complexity of the old environment but face many new challenges.

  • Increased expectations of customers (e.g. self-service, SLAs, tested service continuity). Focus on application and business performance and service levels and lower tolerance of outage.

  • Increased need for infrastructure to keep pace with agile development and improve speed-to-market. DevOps requires bringing marketing and operations involvement into development lifecycle and engaging customer in agile, iterative development.

  • Managing the multi-technology, multi-sourced landscape, and hybrid world requires crossing organization boundaries – managing traditional silos will no longer work.

  • Increased virtualization makes it difficult to sectionalize, troubleshoot, and remediate. Fluid environment requires new tools to respond to service topology changes and provide updated resource bindings integrating real-time OSS into legacy environment.

  • Requirement for new skills (e.g. service offering definition, policy management) to manage in a software defined and virtualized environment.

  • Increased focus on securing the enterprise and extended enterprise

We need to rethink and reinvent the operating model in order to address the challenges of Agile, Cloud, and Software Defined. The talk will focus on the theme of microservices and how it can be can be a powerful concept and technology in this new world. From service catalogs to operation support systems to virtualized functions, microservices promise to bring great benefits in each area. Benefits include but are not limited to quick time to market for new product offerings, multi-sourced and field updatable operation systems and flexible virtualized functions that can scale optimally. But they also bring some new challenges which we will outline.


Biography:

Dr. Ramesh Nagarajan is Chief Innovation Director in the Communication, Media and Technology operating unit of Accenture. He is focused on working with communication service providers to help them in their SDN/NFV and transformation initiatives. Ramesh has an extensive background in the SDN/NFV space at Alcatel-Lucent and more recently at Overture Networks. At Overture Networks, he helped transform Overture from a carrier Ethernet hardware vendor to a market leading SDN and NFV software player. The products achieved significant market traction including numerous awards for most innovative NFV strategy, best new telecom product and best multi-vendor solution among others. Prior to Overture, Ramesh was at Alcatel-Lucent as one of the early members of the Cloudband NFV team. His earlier experience includes both technology and business roles in the wireline, wireless and cable technology spaces at AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs. He has helped launch over ten products, inventor for over 50 patents and author of several ITU standards.