We are witnessing a number of techno-economic drivers (e.g., global and low costs
access to IT and network technologies, moreover accelerating) which are creating the conditions for a “Cambrian
explosion” of new roles, services, value chains, etc… This is true for
Telecommunications/ICT and also for several social contexts (e.g., Smart Cities) and industrial ecosystems
(e.g., Industry 4.0).
We realize that Telecom infrastructure will
have to “tame” a growing “complexity” (e.g., hyper-connectivity, heterogeneity of
nodes and systems, high level of dynamism, emerging of non-linear dynamics in
feedbacks loops, possible uncontrolled interactions); they will have to be very effective,
low-costs and self-adaptable to highly variable context dynamics (e.g., needs of changing strategies
with other Players, any-services fast-provisioning and adaptive enforcement of
biz policies to end-Users and Vertical Apps requirements, local-vs-global
geographical policies, etc).
We’ve been mentioning
several time that in order to face such challenges, we need proper innovative
paradigms (e.g.,
based on DevOps, adopting Computational Intelligence, capable of scaling to
millions of VM/Containers), to manage the future Softwarized Telecom
infrastructures (i.e., based on SDN, NFV, pursuing decoupling of HW from
SW, virtualizations anc Cloudification-Edgification of functions and services). And this
implies challenges not only technical/engineering but also related to
governance, organization, culture, skills, etc…
Now let’s open this vision to extend the
concept of infrastructure beyond the Telecoms. Also a Smart City has
its own physical infrastructure, which is heterogeneous and includes a complex variety
of resources, whose dynamics are intertwined; but also a smart factory in I4.0; they
will have to be very effective, low-costs and self-adaptable to highly variable context dynamics.
So my take is that we are facing a sort of non-linear phase transition of a complex system
(the intertwining of our Society, Industries, Culture…) whose control variables
include (hyper-connectivity, globalization, digitalization, etc). How extracting value from this phase transition?
The models of an Operating
System (OS) would represent - for any Industry adopting it – the “strategic and
unifying approach” to manage this phase transition. Not only it allows taming the complex oscillations of this transition but
also it extracts dynamically value from them, creating and running ecosystems,
even new ones.
In the very essence, this requires virtualization/abstraction of all resources/service/functions (e.g., in broad sense including the ones of a Smart City or a I4.0 Factory) and their secure APIs accesses from both End-Users/Developers, Third Parties and other related Operators.
In the very essence, this requires virtualization/abstraction of all resources/service/functions (e.g., in broad sense including the ones of a Smart City or a I4.0 Factory) and their secure APIs accesses from both End-Users/Developers, Third Parties and other related Operators.
The future sustainability of the Digital Society is about the flourishing and running of 5G Softwarised Ecosystems.
My take is that we need a system thinking to design this Digital Society OS, capable of enabling dynamical trade-off Slow-Cheap to Fast-Costly vs Flexible-General to Inflexible-Special.