I have been privileged throughout my career to work with and for service providers. And these days, it's particularly exciting to be a service provider.   Nearly every aspect of our lives is being impacted by the explosion of IP devices, apps and services. We believe this creates a$2 trillion opportunity for service providers over the next decade. Can you imagine what that means for service providers around the globe? The possibilities to transform the service provider business and consumer experiences are endless.

My passion lies in mathematics and engineering, specifically in determining how technology can become a catalyst for business and experience transformation. I'd like to share with you how I believe Service Providers can thrive in the future. It comes down to five integrated principles that service providers need to take to transform their networks:virtualize, automation, simplification,and-programmability, to reduce total cost of ownership.   Let me explain briefly what I mean by each.

Virtualization is about decoupling network functions from the hardware. It includes innovations such as NFV, network orchestration andopen integration across solution components. Automation simplifies management across people and process flows and where standardized APIs become important. Network simplification refers to accelerating time-to-market through offering customer-facing services in a completely new way. One approach is centralized service creation and delivery -whether through a cloud, virtualized network or automated processes such as provisioning. A programmable network refers to managing all of the data and the path it flows through the network. Segment Routing IPv6 is our next major frontier in network architecture that will help service providers keep pace with great, more complex traffic flows. The ability to reduce total cost of ownership is realized when all of these foundational principles come together in a secure fashion so that service providers can protect their business and protect their customers.

Why are these five principles for service provider technology transformation so important? At the end of the day, they will help service providers achieve their top-of-mind goals: accelerated speed, greater flexibility, and profitable growth (through new revenue streams and cost of ownership reductions) while mitigating risk.

Now is the time for service providers to capture$2 trillion in unprecedented market opportunities over the next decade. Now is the time for service providers to be faster to market, cost-efficient and more secure than ever before. Now is the time for service providers to shift thinking from "our systems are limited" to "we have the means and the right partner to do it!" There truly has never been a better time to be a service provider. I can't wait to take this transformation journey with you.