Game of Thrones
’ final season was watched by more than 1 billion people across 170 countries, so I am banking on a GoT analogy translating well enough across our global audience – because there is no more vivid description for how it feels to watch the assemblage of operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) competitors march toward what seems like a final resolution in 5G.Software suppliers have been jockeying for position within CSPs’ support architecture for three decades; every time a new generation of telecom network technology assumes the throne. Some are very good at improvising and finding their niche. Others integrate well with partners and parlay their strengths into an advantage. Some are protected by the high castle walls they have built with entrenched solutions, although we have seen that if Winterfell can fall, so can any market-leading supplier.
The recent evolution of Ciena’s Blue Planet shows how alliances and applying the right mix of specialized skills to the most important challenges can position a startup, a niche player, or even a market outlier to loom large and win an important role in the new world left behind by the fall of legacy systems.
This week, Ciena closed the acquisition of Centina Systems, which it will integrate into its Blue Planet Division. The addition of Centina’s service assurance analytics and network performance management solutions will help Blue Planet focus its collective skills on one of the most important tasks on the transformation plans of most communications service providers (CSPs): enabling reliable closed-loop automation that will drive adaptive, self-healing and self-optimizing networks.
Centina’s is not the only new skill set that Blue Planet has added to its multi-domain service orchestrator heritage as of late. In the last 18 months, Ciena has made two other acquisitions that the company integrated into Blue Planet even as it re-organized Blue Planet into its own division.
- When Ciena acquired it in October 2018, Don River was a quiet, unassuming, but successful and innovative, provider of OSS solutions that, among other things, enabled the federation of data among multiple inventories and led to higher resource visibility. Now it is an essential part of Blue Planet’s Intelligent Automation Platform.
- Packet Design optimization and analytics prowess was added in July 2018. This enhanced Blue Planet’s ability to provide real-time visibility into IP/MPLS networks that and optimize network traffic flows.
Together, these acquisitions make Ciena’s Blue Planet a formidable provider of solutions that fill an urgent need, one that CSPs have expressed interest in but only recently committed to adopting. In a survey last month, nearly 100 CSPs told TM Forum that in addition to broad agility, the two most important attributes they would like to see in future OSS architectures are closed-loop automation for fulfillment and assurance, and for network optimization.
Blue Planet is marshalling all its new resources to focus on this requirement. Over the next three-to-five years as 5G Standalone is implemented, suppliers not already outfitted with end-to-end solutions will be doing likewise: determining their highest skills, doing what they can to enhance those skills through alliances and acquisitions, differentiate themselves with innovation, target the applicable need and fight until the legacy white walkers are defeated and a new era of support infrastructure reigns.
It may not be a blood bath in the end, like the Game of Thrones, but over eight seasons, the intrigue of GoT was 90% about the positioning and maneuvering. It will be the same in the OSS/BSS space, and it will be fun to watch, not just for the competition but for the innovation that results. As GoT author George R.R. Martin said, “Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.”