If you haven't watched yesterday's interview with the CEOs of Verizon, IBM, and Qualcomm on CNBS yet, I would highly encourage watching it .
If you don't have the time/patience, here's my top 4 takeaways (I'm paraphrasing of course):
1. Unlike the previous generations, 5G will have a big impact on enterprises, and the enterprise part might actually be the more exciting and a bigger revenue piece of 5G
2. It's not just 5G; it's 5G + Edge Computing + NFV/SDN
3. Enterprises will start taking advantage of 5G by 2022
4. Open standards/open source will be important
Of course ONAP didn't come up specifically. But I can't help but imagine what a great opportunity this is for ONAP. With the Frankfurt release in 1H 2020, the 5G use case blueprint will be fully fleshed out. And with the support for Kubernetes becoming more robust, any arbitrary Edge Computing application will also be supported.
While automation is not the first thing on people's mind as they roll out 5G/Edge, these services will not be viable unless there is full automation in terms of orchestration and management. When the need for automation becomes urgent (my prediction sometime in 2020), the combination of open source benefits such as vendor agnostic/no lock-in and architectural benefits such as real-time closed loop automation, positions ONAP to dominate 5G/Edge.
Not sure what ONAP is? Read our ONAP Demystified Book. If you're ready to give ONAP a test-drive, try out Aarna Networks ONAP Distribution 3.0 that comes with commercial support.
