As the industry moves into the next phases of the 5G rollout, operators face the need to deliver a greater number of new services, with increased speed, lower latency and strict Quality of Service (QoS), at higher speeds and over more endpoints than ever before. This is the lynchpin for delivering higher quality, more profitable services. Among the many advantages, 5G’s inherent virtualization and cloud-native frameworks set the stage for not only hardware-software disaggregation, but also the disaggregation of vendors, promoting best-of-breed Open RAN (O-RAN). The bottom line is, if the Network Functions (NFs) that comprise the RAN aren’t flexible and high-performing, then none of the valuable Over The Top (OTT) services will be either. Therefore, great care must be taken when choosing NF, cloud platform and orchestration vendors.