The Wall Street Journal recently reported that AT&T’s network virtualization efforts are moving beyond testing and prototyping and into large-scale deployment. The news suggests that the carrier could gain a significant competitive edge by reducing capital expenditures and increasing capacity.
In a broader sense, the deployment reflects the changing nature of the cloud space and foreshadows a potentially significant consolidation in the relatively near future. Specifically, AT&T and other big players are increasingly embracing open source technologies and moving beyond the elasticity limitations of the commercial virtualization approaches they had previously been using.
AT&T joined the OpenStack Foundation as a member back in 2012 and now has Platinum-level board representation. Assuming that OpenStack is in fact what’s under the covers of the new virtualization offering, this will indeed be a significant competitive advantage. Although AT&T jumped on the OpenStack bandwagon relatively recently, it looks like they’re already starting to reap the benefits.
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