3. A promising collaboration between operators and industrials on the standardization front

More than three decades of “Internet standardization” have shown that the specification of data models is not that straightforward. This is because of at least two major reasons :

• for more than 30 years, legacy network equipment manufacturers have considered their technology as a competitive advantage, thereby leading to proprietary, vendor-specific, data models and the burden of vendor lock-ins. This was particularly exacerbated around optical networks, where each vendor literally imposed their own network management system as an inevitable black box ;

• over the same period, operators have also developed their savoir-faire as a key competitive advantage. Such savoir-faire had to rely upon these proprietary data models. Operators were reluctant to share their design and management practices, unsurprisingly....