In last decade telecom industry has gone through transformational changes that started with the introduction of the concept of software defined networking or SDN and the emergence of Big Data as well as Machine Learning techniques. With hyper-scalers like Google and Amazon in the horizon, the landscape for traditional Telco service providers are changing. The course is primarily about this change and its profound impacts in telco service providers from different angles, including architecture, service design, business model, security, and privacy. The SDN journey starts by network programmability, that is why the first part of will be walking the students through different steps of building a programmable network. Having programmable network we will have to start building intelligence by introducing closed loop control logics, the second part of the course deals with ideas around creating multilayer control logics, where we employ concepts of Big Data and Machine Learning to create innovative services. Given that SDN is meaningless without proper abstraction and interface modeling, we will discuss model driven approach to network management and from there we open the door to discuss orchestration strategies. Nowadays all telco discussions end with 5G; therefore, we explain 5G with the focus on the role of SDN there, followed by some important 5G use cases including smart cities and IoT. In the last part of the course we zoom into software defined security aspects, as well as a discussion on new methods of creating innovative services. the course will be concluded by discussing some operational aspects of SDN and the role of AI and Machine Learning there.