Mobile World Congress 2016, Day 2 Recap

Day 2 of Mobile World Congress was awesome. The overarching theme of the day was again focused on NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation). But before we get to that, I’m excited to announce that Canonical received a Best of Show award from Trusted Reviews for the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Tablet. A huge crowd gathered to watch us demo the tablet / mobile / desktop interface.

Yesterday I shared some photos from my personal Google Photos album. I’ve added a few updates, and will again tomorrow.

I had the chance to hear from several leaders of mobile operators talk about their journey to digitalisation. They talked about becoming data-first operators, with a focus on data services as opposed to voice. A lot of us directly experienced this transition as end users of mobile devices and services. It required cultural shifts as much as technology shifts for the providers to finally make it happen.

The next transition that mobile operators face is less visible to the end user, but tremendously important for anyone involved with modern clouds and microservices architectures. That’s the transition to fully virtualised datacenters. Telecoms providers are early pioneers in their plans for transforming every device in their managed infrastructure to a virtual function, service, or application. Why? Economics.

Providing data access service to hundreds of millions or even approaching 1 billion users makes hyperscale, abstracted and modeled applications the only viable way to do it. It’s not really economically viable to continue to install box after box of special-use devices for every service they want to offer.

Michael Duncan of Telefonica talked about some key enablers to the next phase of digitalisation for telco operators. The first thing he said was Big Data. We’ve seen similar requirements from our Ubuntu OpenStack cloud customers.

Michael went on to explain that organizations can’t properly transition infrastructure and service to the modern digital era unless they understand how the customer is trying to use the infrastructure and interact with the systems provided. Without big data collection tools, and data intersection analysis, organizations can’t make informed decisions on what to implement next and where to focus their resources.

If you aren’t familiar with big data, you can learn more about it here, and if you’re interested in big data solutions for telecoms and service providers, check here

Masakatsu Fujiwara, Head of European R&D Representative Office at NTT talked about the separation of functions from equipment and hardware being modularized. He said that by breaking down NFV into small functions, each can be assembled as a resource and a new communications system can be created by integrating the new network resources. Additionally, network failure can be simply repaired by swapping out a resource. This drastically reduces TCO.

Again, it’s exciting to hear premier technology leaders talk about exactly what we’re doing with Ubuntu OpenStack at Canonical. We have the right tools on the right technology at the right time to solve the world’s biggest computing problems.

If you’re here at MWC 2016, be sure to come by the booth! We’ve had visitors from all around the world so far, including some students who’d received sponsorship from SAP to attend. The enterprising young technologist shared all sorts of passion for Ubuntu, and even took an interest in writing Juju Charms.

Come tell us your story. Where are you in your journey to reach a fully virtualised digital infrastructure?

If you aren’t here, follow us on Twitter @ubuntu, @ubuntucloud and @baumanbill for tweets of the excitement all week long. We’re just getting started!

Day 1 Recap >

Day 3 Recap >