"This book lays out much of what we''ve learned at AT&T about SDN and NFV. Some of the smartest network experts in the industry have drawn a map to help you navigate this journey. Their goal isn''t to predict the future but to help you design and build a network that will be ready for whatever that future holds. Because if there''s one thing the last decade has taught us, it''s that network demand will always exceed expectations. This book will help you get ready." -- Randall Stephenson, Chairman, CEO, and President of AT&T "Telecom operators face a continuous challenge for more agility to serve their customers with a better customer experience and a lower cost. This book is a very inspiring and vivid testimony of the huge transformation this means, not only for the networks but for the entire companies, and how AT&T is leading it. It provides a lot of very deep insights about the technical challenges telecom engineers are facing today.

Beyond AT&T, I''m sure this book will be extremely helpful to the whole industry. I truly thank John and his team for providing this insight on best practices for this transformation towards software-centric approach." --Alain Maloberti, Group Chief Network Officer, Orange Labs Networks "Pinch yourself. AT&T - the big, old, slow telephone company - is completely transforming itself, and the Internet too. This book explains how, in 5 short years, John Donovan has led a revolution, turning around one of the largest companies in the world, retraining a workforce of over 100,000 people. In Silicon Valley it''s said that ''Software is eating the world (of infrastructure).'' AT&T is doing exactly that by moving everything it does to software. "We invented SDN back in 2007 to solve the following problem: Networking equipment (the switches and routers that make up the Internet) were closed, proprietary and vertically integrated.

Equipment vendors built badly-engineered products with poor interfaces and no means for customers to improve them; much like IBM built mainframes back in the 1970s. Put another way, the equipment vendors had (and still do to some extent) the Internet in a stranglehold. Google broke it first, by building their own equipment. As Google points out, this was about taking control more than saving cost. Nowadays we take it for granted that those who build and operate the largest networks can write, buy, commission, or simply download the software that defines how their network operates. AT&T is the first large telco and ISP to take on this challenge at such scale. I pinch myself because no-one would have expected AT&T to do this first. It''s really impressive to see the grit and determination behind this revolution of our largest ISP.

What the AT&T team is doing epitomizes our original goals for SDN: To put those who own and operate the world''s largest networks in control of the software that defines how their network operates. We wanted to hand them the keys. If they succeed, it will transform the very heart of the Internet." -- Nick McKeown, Stanford University, USA "This new book should be read by any organization faced with a future driven by a ''shift to software.'' It is a holistic view of how AT&T has transformed its core infrastructure from hardware based to largely software based to lower costs and speed innovation. To do so, AT&T had to redefine their technology supply chain, retrain their workforce, and moved toward open source user-driven innovation; all while managing one of the biggest networks in the world. It is an amazing feat that will position AT&T in a leading position for years to come." -- Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation "Software is changing the world, and networks too.

In this in-depth book, AT&T''s top networking experts discuss how they''re moving software-defined networking from concept to practice and why it''s a business imperative to do this rapidly." -- Urs Hölzle, SVP Cloud Infrastructure, Google "This is the most complete presentation of the approach to modernizing the national network as a software defined entity. The further vision of the national network as a Network Cloud allows the insights flowing from Cloud Computing to be applied to the services provided by the national network presenting them as a set of elastic services which can be ordered and rapidly modified to meet business demand. It also offers opportunities to manage this network and its processes in a more flexible fashion, well beyond the TMN model from the past. The book is well organized, clearly written, and provides the only overall view of the application of software defined principles to the evolution of the national network. Certainly a must read for academics as well as networking technologists." -- Frank M. Groom, PhD, Center for Information and Communication Sciences, Ball State University.