1. 2020 VISION, GET TO THE FUTURE FIRST: BIG DATA, NETWORK DRIVEN
SOFTWARE …
Imagine it is Saturday noon, you woke up a little bit late after a hard work week, still
in your pajamas holding a hot cup of coffee and flipping through the TV channels.
A commercial about the new iPhone 10 is playing and your mind wanders for a
moment and you wonder when will you get your hands on the awesome gadget.
Right at that moment your doorbell rings, you walk to the door, open it and stumble
on the mail delivery guy.
He hands you a box and ask for your signature. You wonder what could that be
since you didn’t recently order anything, you double check the address and name on
the box making sure it wasn’t a mistake and you realize that it wasn’t.
After signing your name and thanking the mail man you can’t wait to open the
strange box anticipating a surprise from a family member. The box reveals the
iPhone 10: the electronic jewel you were just dreaming about with all the bells and
whistles.
You looked at the sender’s address and smiled, the box was stamped with your
name and address with a bill inside: the new phone was delivered to you before you
even ordered it.
Pretty farfetched and fictional. Right? Not so fast, that is the future and the future is
here: this is part of the 2020 vision.
How would we do that? BIG DATA .
2. With the digital revolution, huge amount of data help understand dramatically
customers and predict their buying patterns. Powerful algorithms predict what
customers would like to buy next and preforms better every time a customer
respond or ignore a recommendation while online. The big data revolution surpasses
analytic used in the past because it allows us to measure and therefore precisely
manage and predict customer behavior like never before.
As Ralph De La Vega: President and CEO of AT&T Mobile & Business Solutions put it
well: big data creates value with untapped insights.
Big data is not all about the use of huge amount of data to understand customers
but also the speed of its creation. Real-time or nearly real-time information makes it
possible for a company to be much more agile than its competitors and have an
edge.
This concept of agility has been best described by John Stankey, CEO AT&T
Entertainment and Internet Services in charge of internet integration of ATT merger
with Direct TV during the last town hall meeting where he talked about innovation
and agility being core values at AT &T.
With the acquisition of Direct TV there is a foresight of explosive video and data
consumption (Traffic on our network alone increased by an astonishing 100,000 percent
since 2007. Video traffic alone doubled last year and by now it represents half of all data
traffic) which would drive network demand, thus requiring innovative ways to better
manage our networks.
Software defined Network (SDN), a more agile and flexible way to manage networks
and find a solution to the ever increasing huge demand of data is part of the 2020
vision.
The goal of using an SDN architecture is to allow network engineers and
administrators to respond quickly to changing business requirements. In a software-
3. defined network, a network administrator can shape traffic from a centralized control
console without having to touch individual switches, and can deliver services to
wherever they are needed in the network, without regard to what specific devices a
server or other device is connected to.
With BIG DATA come security concerns: systems vulnerability to more sophisticated
threats, protection of customer personal information and privacy are a huge priority
for AT&T as more devices and “things” are connected to the internet. On the other
hand new innovative security strategies to prevent and detect fraud and advanced
persistent threats using Big Data style analysis are being used.
With Big Data, future explosive video consumption, software defined Network, the
internet of things: the future is here and the future is exciting, so fasten your seat-
belts and let’s get to the future first.