For the largest communications service providers, network transformation is becoming a do-it-yourself operation. Using open source and internal software development teams, companies such as CenturyLink, Verizon and Telefónica are developing for themselves what they once purchased from the vendor community.

The TM Forum 's recently released Digital Transformation Tracker reflects this shift, noting that operators are acknowledging they are adopting a larger technology role, hiring hundreds of software engineers and developing new internal processes, including DevOps and Agile methods. Those trends only increase in the years to come, as shown below.

 Source: TM Forum's Digital Transformation Tracker 3

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) has been doing in-house software development for decades, as have others, but the rise of open source is creating a new opportunity for operators to get help from the broader community for what they can't do internally. AT&T did this when it open-sourced its ECOMP project to become a significant part of the seed code of Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) , and it has done similar things with other projects such as its Disaggregated Network Operating System, or dNOS, now a project at the Linux Foundation, and Akraino, the edge computing software project launched with seed code from AT&T. (See MANO Marriage: ECOMP, OPEN-O Converge as ONAP, AT&T's Rice: White Box OS a Team Effort, and AT&T Boosts Akraino With Code, Summit.)

In each case, AT&T executives said they were moving to an open source approach to get help in moving forward faster, realizing that much of the work being done is common to the industry.