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NaaS: I do I do I do I do

What is the first sign that a company really believes in the product it is selling? Well, here is a big, flashing, neon sign, as offered by Telus CTO Ibrahim Gedeon: it is when a company eats its own dog food.

Tim McElligott
09 May 2019
NaaS: I do I do I do I do

NaaS: I do I do I do I do

Download the related report Network as a Service: Addressing the full enterprise opportunity.

What is the first sign that a company really believes in the product it is selling? Well, here is a big, flashing, neon sign, as offered by Telus CTO Ibrahim Gedeon in reference to its Network as a Service solution: it is when a company eats its own dog food.

I once told a friend when VoIP services first hit the small business market and communications resellers were pushing her to deploy the technology, to ask the salesperson how he likes VoIP. Ask what kind of phones his office uses, and whose IP-PBX is installed—just to be sure they were really eating their own dog food, that they believed in the product they were selling.

Telus was an early adopter of NaaS and SD-WAN services. However, it is not the only service provider demonstrating its confidence in NaaS by consuming it internally. In a new report by TM Forum, titled “Network as a Service: Addressing the full enterprise opportunity”, we see that Telstra and Vodafone are also employing the technology internally. They are using it to enter new markets, serve their many lines of business, and experiment with new enterprise services.

Vodafone uses NaaS to connect its 25 different operating companies. These companies, in turn, deliver NaaS connectivity services to the enterprise. Externally, Vodafone id developing a new go-to-market model through which it works with enterprise customers collaboratively on creating new services using a NaaS environment. The company calls this its co-creation model. Together with customers Vodafone works in a test environment to experiment with deployment scenarios such as which parts of a service the customer may want to control itself versus what it would task Vodafone with managing.

Telstra is using NaaS as part of its a massive network modernization effort that requires digital transformation of both the network and the underlying operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) and processes. The transformation is a collaboration between the company’s network and IT teams to build Telstra’s ‘Networks for the Future’ architecture, which is moving away from traditional physical networks supported by silos of OSS/BSS to virtualized, software-defined networks supported and orchestrated by centralized IT.

NaaS is helping Telstra save operating expenses by creating more reusable building blocks in across its operations. The company’s lack of reuse was unsustainable. NaaS helps Telstra abstract the complexity of its network and operations from its services. The company modelled each of its network domains as services, then exposed the services using TM Forum Open APIs, enabling the abstraction. This simplified service management and reduced time-to-market for new network products.

The benefits of Naas go far beyond operational agility and cost reduction. Serving the enterprise market with new value-added services will help CSPs improve the amount of revenue generated by this new opportunity. The chart below, from a TM Forum 2018 Survey on Future Networks, shows that CSPs expect that the 10% or less of their total revenue generated today by B2B services that most will ultimately rise to more than 70%. NaaS can help deliver this result.
Seeing how CSPs are benefitting from their own technology is the internet-age equivalent of the ancient cupbearer who tasted the wine of kings to check for poison. NaaS won’t kill you. It can only make you better.