This blog post summarizes a keynote presentation by Walter Miron of TELUS at ONE Summit North America 2022. In his keynote address, Miron discussed the reasons why service providers value open source and selected benefits.
The Value of open source to Service Providers
TELUS, a Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) Platinum member company, is a leading global service provider based in Canada. TELUS started as a regional service provider in Western Canada but has since grown to be a world leading communications and IT company, with 80,000 employees across 20 countries in the world. It’s grown from being a telco, providing wireless data and IP voice, to being a thriving media and communications company that integrates television, entertainment, video, and home and physical security into its core business. Furthermore, TELUS Health is the largest health IT provider in Canada and is providing great health outcomes around the world. Most recently, the organization launched TELUS Agriculture, which is looking to build global food security. To put the numbers into perspective, TELUS has 17M customer connections, $17B CAD of revenue, and over $1B CAD of philanthropic donations over the last couple of decades.
Evidently, TELUS has grown up.
Reasons to join LFN, a leader in open source networking software
As TELUS works to drive innovation and scale across different sectors, they’re embracing technology trends that include cloud computing and virtualization. But, according to Walter Miron, “we can’t get there alone, for a variety of reasons, including durability and legitimacy. Other important factors to consider when collaborating in open source include the community, project governance, and vertical industry collaboration and participation.”
Community
LFN enables access to industry giants and community contributors that drive innovation. TELUS has been consuming open source code for quite some time, and can now benefit from the experience and expertise of the entire LFN community to help them learn, innovate, and grow.
Governance
“If we want to learn about best practices for operating an OSPO with our organization, we need to learn about governance. LFN provides a great model for us to emulate,” said Walter Miron. “Including council on best [software] packages to implement (and at what support model), and how to decide what to commercialize and what to keep community-based.”
Industry collaboration
Being a member of LFN affords TELUS the opportunity to meet with industry peers and to help drive product roadmaps, technical contributions, and branding, but also to move the entire industry towards innovation models instead of just consumption models. TELUS is in the business of people and, like all organizations, they want to make sure they’re attracting good talent, developing those team members, and creating a community of open source advocates to help the greater good of the industry. This is especially important for TELUS on becoming a software-centric organization; to do that, they need to garner support from (financial resources, people resources, money, buy-in from legal communities, etc.).
“We are standing on the shoulders of tech giants, which helps us learn and it helps us contribute.” – Walter Miron, Telus
As TELUS moves forward on its cloud journey and moves towards full RAN (and 5G), being part of LFN is an important part of the journey. TELUS is eager and excited to participate in the community of service providers that value open source, to share its scale and technical domain leadership, as well as its ability to learn and listen.
Watch Walter Miron’s full presentation from ONE Summit North America 2022, entitled “The Value of Linux Foundation Networking to Service Providers,” on the LFN YouTube channel.
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