Chris Rice was made irrelevant after contracts cancelled with Lumina Networks.

NO one walks from 25 years of service, so I suspect that the remaining AT&T team will be broken up and hired by respective carriers who need ongoing support and maintenance. This is the unfortunate end of an era, that of the pure-play SDN controller platform Open source SDN to accelerate telco network automation that AT&T abandoned

Backed by AT&T, Lumina Networks received funding to expand its business, and to fund development of its OpenDaylight portfolio, particularly its SDN controller. AT&T financial backing in Lumina demonstrated the weight and importance each operator is putting behind open source SDN controllers. Open source controllers tie in better with white boxes, enabling the move toward taking proprietary hardware with bundled software, decoupling the hardware from the software, and using commercial off-the shelf (COTS) servers with separate (operator-chosen) software to lower costs and reduce vendor lock-in.
After years of SDN development AT&T finds that they don't need, open source vendor Lumina and the Networks shut down operations. and bye bye Chris...pretty sad

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Ignore Nyquist at your own parel. The real karmic action of all this white box cloud that you purchased at the first tranche teaser rate? Welp it justified all the hardware and systems that were let go never to return. Rather than building the infrastructure to supply that cloud demand to yourself and sell excess Bandwidth to others Outsourcing the required clock cycles and bandwidth to other platform providers was even more enticing in the short run. Whats wrong with that? It frees up that capital to buy Tee Vee. Want to upgrade that NSV to support new / future tech?The new subscription and develipment price is 5X . The hardware required to scale? well that requires more shelf space more electricity more hardware. You have to pay a third party cost plus for that now. You just pushed the bubble around. Eventually it pops. ASICs? Sure. Develop it in house, after all ATT invented the transistor. Wait, bellcore was spun off eons ago, and lucent and the whole lot. Good luck just pushing a button to rebuild that mindshare. No one wants to spend on R&D or NRE. But wait there is this >$2T stock valuation company that does. Maybe thats why their stock has split 28 times in less than five years.......

SDN can use ASICs too. There were whitebox router projects underway under Rice that were beginning to use using Broadcom's merchant silicon to speed things up.

For those that wonder, ASIC, application-specific integrated circuit. It means a piece of hardware that will need to be emulated by software. Of course the software is premium quality from Mubia U.

@gix+16Ek8VU5 - truth and just shows the real deep problem with att and why it will never change.

keep buying all those specific cpus and passing the cost to the customer. I guess that is why my fiber to my house went from 900 up and down to 200 up and down after six months because all those plain old cpus. lol don't worry there will be other companies that will make it work and give the customer honest, better, and faster service.

@udg Absolutely correct.
ASICs will win every time and that's not something that can be duplicated with even the best of software. I'm sure it was a nice sales pitch to the leadership, but when the leadership is full of accountants with no engineering background this is what happens. It takes a lot of hardware and good software to come close to matching a well designed ASIC. The C suite were sold a false bill of goods and didn't even realize it. Maybe that's why Mr D is gone now.

Att has no clue how to do open source software and never will.

There is no way for a generic CPU to switch network packets faster than dedicated ASIC hardware. SDN was doomed to failure before it even launched.

Also, this was one of John D's ideas and Stankey is eliminating them one by one. He just doesn't realize he's eliminating most of the potential growth areas for T as a result.

was the other way around,

Chris incompetence k–led Lumina..but it took 25 years to get him out, by asking for his resignation.. Karma

Doesn't anyone post links to sources anymore? The sources for the OP's quotes:
https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/open-source-vendor-lumina-networks-pulls-plug
https://www.omdia.com/resources/product-content/att-and-verizon-back-open-source-sdn-startup-lumina-networks

Also Chris Rice is on the rebound:

"Rice said he already has several options on the table for his next career move. He said automating SDN and cloudification, all of which he has extensive experience with while at AT&T, are the main areas of focus for his next job."

Source: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/after-25-years-chris-rice-says-adios-to-at-t

oh please, the arrogance of Chris and labs, screwed this from the beginning. "not invented here" attitude made this thing a failure from the start. It's just too bad Chris k–led Lumina networks in the process.

Where are the ssip offers before layoffs?

Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

Chris Rice was made irrelevant after contracts cancelled with Lumina Networks.

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