Vijoy Pandey is the man in charge of Google's global mesh of data centers and the backbone networks that connect them. As such he has a unique insight into the challenges of scaling and costs that 'traditional services' providers are now facing as they prepare to transition and transform their networks via SDN and NFV. He says that the concept of 'consumability' as taken from the network operator's point-of-view is a key challenge. Unsurprisingly given his background and the fact that Google built its huge networks from scratch and the ground up, Vijoy Pandey says standards take too long to emerge and are always too far behind the curve of what is a incredibly dynamic sector. The answer, he says, is to build a new network regardless of the state of the standardisation procedures and then learn from what happens when new services are introduced. That was Google's approach and once implemented the benefits of it soon became apparent.

Filmed at: MPLS + SDN + NFV World Congress, Paris, 2016