Open Daylight (ODL) silver member AT&T aims to virtualize 75% of its targeted network by 2020, with 5% projected by the end of 2015.

“Our vision is that we will have a platform that can create new services we can’t even imagine,” Margaret Chiosi, AVP Individual Contributor, Technical Strategy at AT&T, told theCUBE’s Jeff Frick at the OpenDaylight Summit in Santa Clara, CA.

However, as Chiosi explained, “It’s not as easy as saying ‘let’s just do OS, let’s do software,’ and it all just magically happens. You have to have the right building blocks to make it happen.”

AT&T believes in ODL as one of those blocks. “This conference, focus on OpenDaylight, which is more focus in a controller space, is critical for us,” she said.

The company has already rolled out an SDN global controller on ODL and submitted a YANG Model Design Studio into ODL with the purpose of making it easier for non-programmers to create things. “We’re using this in our network; we’re using it big time,” said Chiosi.

Creating services faster and experimenting more quickly

AT&T has already dramatically reduced cycle time for network on-demand services, with concept to beta-delivery dropping from 18-24 months to six months or less. “We find we can create services faster that fit to the needs of the market,” Chiosi told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team.

Chiosi sees the biggest hurdle facing the community as getting all pieces of open source working together: “Just having Open Platform by itself is not sufficient … the whole thing has to work together, and no one is putting it together.”

Although she describes the OPNFV open-source project as the platform “we are all going to use,” Chiosi believes that the platform is currently not working and outlined a goal to “fix it so it works and we can all get on with life and back to our core competency.”

Watch the full interview with Margaret Chiosi below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenDaylight Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE