Grant Lenahan and Francis Haysom explore how the communications world has changed dramatically, and cloud-based technologies are accelerating this change.
While the rise of cloud has increased competition, it has also increased service agility and lowered costs to levels never before achievable. But the full benefit of cloud technology will only be realized when we embrace entirely new operations paradigms and reject old assumptions based on outdated principles and processes.
In “OSS Sea Change”, we wrote: “This [document] investigates the fundamental technical and operational changes in “cloud” that force us to question everything we once knew about operations, what is feasible, and how to make smart investment decisions. CSPs need to change their OSS approach and how they can make the transformation from legacy OSS and hardware networks to cloud native software enabled networks. Failure to think differently compromises the USD Billions that are being invested, with the many of the blocking issues being business assumptions, rather than technical issues.”
Appledore argue that embracing the future means rejecting many of the principles that industry experts have long held dear. Forgetting the past challenges institutional inertia – from accepted best practices, to how we generate requirements, to how we build business cases, and even how we execute procurement. In fact, maintaining legacy principles and practices offers the chance to implement the perfect solution for 1995 – and ensure that we are 25 years behind the times.
In this white paper we describe a modern, service-oriented management infrastructure, and specifically measure the Blue Planet1 Intelligent Automation portfolio and long-stated vision against our documented recommendations. We encourage readers to arm themselves with our documentation and do the same.
Appledore believe that much is at stake:
- we estimate that automation can reduce the cost of many network operations by 95-99%;
- that service demand intervals can fall by a similar percentage (weeks to minutes);
- that by the latter half of this decade, the industry will be spending between $11B and $27B (median: $18B) annually on software to yield this automation.
- many services are under competitive threat from public cloud vendors who have adopted these Sea Changes as part of their DNA and operate with a very low-cost structure.
It’s time for network operators to hit the productivity gym!
Over the past 3 years, through organic investment and aggressive acquisition and integration, Blue Planet has assembled a comprehensive management portfolio that delivers on four operational goals:
- Provide a framework that enables a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) operating model
- Deliver high levels of automation
- Maintain an open and standards-based approach
- Ensure closed loop, self-optimizing operations
In the self-managing cloud world, architecture – the “how” things are implemented — is more important than ever. We can always achieve some degree of success with brute force, but this is expensive, time consuming, non-scalable, and drains resources with decades of future maintenance and re-integration.
Blue Planet, to their credit, breaks this mold with a portfolio of inter-related OSS modules that can implement tomorrow’s best practices, and therefore get the most from tomorrow’s network technologies. While no supplier and no CSP is even close to the end state, having a clear vision, and a solution architecture that aligns with that vision is a great start. Critically, it sets up decades of opportunity on an expandable platform, rather than decades of fighting with an old one.
In this paper we will describe the opportunity at hand, what is needed to profit from it, and how Blue Planet can achieve this vision. We encourage all CSPs to adopt these principles, embrace the Sea Change, and find solutions that meet these criteria.
Read the complete Appledore case study to learn how Blue Planet Intelligent Automation portfolio enables a new NaaS operating model.