Many of the news articles we write at SDxCentral are filled with acronyms and dry terminology. But every now and then an executive that we are interviewing will throw out a pearl of wisdom, tell us a funny analogy, or give a clever quip to one of our questions.

Here are some of the most memorable quotes of 2017:

“No one dreamt of doing friendly user trials in LTE. Now we have multiple parties doing pre-standard friendly user trials.” — Gordon Mansfield, VP of RAN and device design at AT&T.

“Comcast always looks to the future. MPLS is a backward-facing investment.” — Kevin O’Toole, SVP of product management for Comcast Business,

“We’ve been hyperconverged for a year and a half, suckers!” — Jon Junell, assistant director of enterprise infrastructure services at Western Washington University.

“Open source is not free. It does provide more choice, but you still need to put it together for a business outcome. It makes more sense to spend it there than to go and drill your own oil well.” — Bhaskar Gorti, president of applications and analytics at Nokia, discussing misconceptions about open source.

“We are very bullish on white box, there is no secret around it." — Andre Fuetsch, CTO and president of AT&T Labs.

“Mobility is the killer app for the multi-cloud world.” — Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix.

"It’s not the Facebook Infra Project; it’s the Telecom Infra project!” — Axel Clauberg, a networking VP at Deutsche Telekom and chairman of the board of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).

 “You can only go so far as a big fish in a little pond. Ecosystem is essential, and non-standard solutions, by definition, will never have it.” — Ron Marquardt, VP of technology at Sprint.

“Amazon wants to make sure it has a seat at the table for Kubernetes and CNCF.” — Edwin Yuen, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

“Once upon a time I thought that hybrid cloud would be a temporary thing.” — John Considine, GM of IBM Cloud Infrastructure.

“In the future, we predict there will be five major clouds in the world. Huawei will work with our partners to build one of those five clouds.” — Guo Ping, Deputy Chairman of the Board, Huawei.

"In telecom, everyone knows Ericsson. … They just spread themselves too thin. They wanted to be everything to everyone, and it just didn’t quite happen.” — Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics.