IDC’s Asia/Pacific Telecom Summit titled “Connecting the Next Billion Users: An Opening Industry” at Sofitel Singapore Sentosa Resort & Spa, Singapore last 19 to 20 November 2015. Over 60 senior level executives from the region joined the event to discuss and share insights on the telecom industry’s shifting.

IDC dubbed 2014 as the year of continued infrastructure build to bring services closer to customers. This 2015, it is all about the year moving to 'Open’ in recognition of the shift towards Open Source technologies, Open Innovation, Open APIs driving new segments like IoT (Internet of Things) and towards the end of proprietary interfaces and better interoperability.

The move to ‘Open’ further extended into new investments where telecom providers would move to adjacent industries, such as e-health, media or content distribution, at an accelerated pace.

Furthermore, the barriers of entry for competitors would also flatten. Most of last year’s predictions came true as the shift to ‘Open’ happened and Software-Defined Networks, Data Centers and Open Source were listed as the most sought technologies in the enterprise for 2015/16.

“As much as the industry will be in build mode and shift to a new era of ‘Open’, 2016 is the year of the platform”, says Dustin Kehoe , Head of Telecom Practice, IDC Asia Pacific.

This year, ‘Open’ goes one step further. The industry will move to a platform-based approach between telecoms and other competitors in their ability to link through storage, network and compute into an infrastructure that is software-defined. Platforms will extend even down to the data center infrastructure layer.

Through platforms, carriers get scale, repeatability and accelerated time to market for new services. Moreover, platforms will be able to resolve unaddressed areas of the market such as the general lack of orchestration to move workloads between networks and clouds.

“Software defined infrastructure and cloud orchestration will be the focus in 2016 and beyond. It is imperative for carriers to prepare for this transition by cross-training network engineers in software, looking at the shifts in architectures from core to edge and find ways to industrialize open APIs that are pervasive in the industry", Mr. Kehoe adds.