Communications service providers (CSPs) want to be enterprise customers’ digital partners. They plan to offer managed solutions that leverage new technologies across telecom and OTT suites of services. To do this, they need more agility to roll out new variants, onboard suppliers and improve automation. This proof of concept Catalyst project, called Agile and automated digital enterprises
, demonstrates a managed digital workplace solution as a reference use case, which includes software-defined networking (SD-WAN) and unified communications, in a managed-services wrap. From the CSPs’ point of view, supporting features as a productized offering means they can be replicated, at scale, fast. Nishi Mathur, Senior Principal Technology Architect, Infosys Technologies, and Catalyst leader, sums up the project’s two-way purpose: “To share modelling guidelines for products, services and architecture decisions so that they can be reused across solutions realized via different partners, and; to show how CSPs can provide customers with an integrated experience across different service components via intent-based service management”.
This is a timely project given the changing office working model across the globe, which presents a unique opportunity for telcos to build on the connectivity they already provide to dispersed enterprise businesses. There is a huge appetite among enterprises for robust managed services to support employees working remotely and help companies maintain their competitive edge. This Catalyst construct could be reused for other enterprise solutions like Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, smart health and more.
An automation first approach for the enterprise segment
The project team leveraged standards including TM Forum’s
Open Digital Architecture and
Open APIs and OASIS’
TOSCA open standards to demonstrate agility and automation for the enterprise segment. This Catalyst sets foundational capabilities to enable the new business and operational model of a digital marketplace.
The Catalyst project is championed by BT and Verizon Communications, with support from participants Blue Planet (a division of Ciena), Infosys, ServiceNow and Vlocity. BT set out the challenge and vision for this the project, and mentored the team through this journey. Amit Sharma, Principal Engineer, OSS at BT, commented, “This is ahead of what is being implemented at BT for its digital workplace offer, so it is almost a first pass at what we want to do in future.”
Verizon’s interest is understanding modelling and APIs as it is in the midst of implementing an open API strategy.
CSPs’ possible enterprise offers range from underlay services based on IP/
MPLS to dedicated internet services and overlay services like SD-WAN and security. For enterprise customers, CSPs can also offer unified communications and edge solutions that run on the underlying network services. The enterprise segment of CSPs’ businesses still involves many manual processes and custom solutions, however newer technologies like 5G, edge compute, and OTT services are opening up many opportunities in this market and CSPs need to have an automation-first approach to stay ahead.
Intent-based service management is the future
As new, innovative and integrated services are rolled out faster than ever, it’s difficult for end users to keep pace. CSPs can leverage technologies like language processing and machine learning to enable users to share their intent easily, rather than choosing from predefined service catalog.
The Catalyst shows how an operator can offer new meeting solutions (e.g. ZOOM) to their customers quickly through service abstraction and APIs. The operator maps “meeting" product offers to an abstracted meeting service definition, agnostic of supplier which means the product and offer definitions are not impacted each time a new meeting solution is added, modified or swapped out.
As Johanne Mayer, a consultant with Blue Planet and the Catalyst’s marketing lead, says, “The more an operator uses standard APIs and service abstraction model across all of their different services, the simpler and faster changes happen in the network with minimal disruption to OSS/BSS, saving operators a lot of time and money and providing better customer service… In removing the resource level information in the OSS/BSS and implementing standards APIs, the operator gains much more flexibility in their offerings and faster time to market using their partners’ solutions or a marketplace.”
Infosys led the solution architecture, program management, integration and ServiceNow implementation. ServiceNow provides customer service and IT service management. Vlocity and ServiceNow are responsible for the party management function from commerce and care perspectives respectively.
Blue Planet contributed the cross-domain orchestration engine that is responsible for the service-intent definitions of the offers, for the discovery and provisioning of services, and keeping the inventory and network in synch.
The TM Forum Open APIs help to synchronize the information in the product catalog, in real time and with minimal development activities, bringing agility and speed to the launch and offer stages of new services. As part of realizing the use case, Infosys developed five TM Forum Open APIs to sit on top of the ServiceNow platform so that integration is now aligned with standards
The team demonstrates its progress in the video presentation and it is already looking towards its goal of creating a digital marketplace in the next phase of this ambitious Catalyst.