The telecommunication industry is in the middle of a significant transformation. Driven by the needs of 5G networks and applications and enabled by transformative technologies such as NFV and cloud-native deployment practices, this is likely to be the single biggest technological and business transformation of the telecom industry since the consolidation of mobile communication infrastructures. The telecom networks that will emerge from this transformation are going to be highly distributed and fully
software-defined, running primarily on homogeneous cloud resources. The flexibility that these characteristics bring will allow mobile operators to address the heterogeneous and divergent needs of 5G applications in a highly efficient manner (e.g. through the use of techniques like network slicing) – but only if the overall network services can be properly managed.