Netcracker Business Cloud: A Game-Changing B2B Service Enablement Platform

Sponsored by: Netcracker

Download the related report: Network as a service: Addressing the full enterprise opportunity While the demand for Network as a Service (NaaS) is clear, many service providers are struggling with the pace of technology and organizational change that is required to meet the demanding needs of the digital enterprise. Agility is the goal and has been the focal point of this research paper, and yet there are very few service providers that are truly benefiting from the substantial increase in new business that NaaS promises. Enterprises, however, are not holding back. They have already moved a significant portion of their applications and services to the cloud in order to benefit from increased productivity, improved economics and a faster response to their market needs. They are becoming digital enterprises with high expectations for on-demand, secure and easy-to-access services that enable a sense of empowerment to drive business success.

Netcracker Business Cloud can help service providers realize the full potential of the B2B market with a complete full-stack NaaS platform focused on helping them build and commercialize cloud service offerings for innovative, digital enterprises. By augmenting existing SD-WAN deployments or launching new NaaS services, operators can create real value from their cloud connectivity offers, expanding deeper into the B2B value chain and maximizing agility through automation. Netcracker Business Cloud brings together the entire SDN/NFV/IT stack—from VNFs to control, orchestration, BSS, OSS, marketplace and self-service portals—and makes it available to service providers from any cloud environment: public, private or hybrid. The platform is based on a modular cloud-native stack with a microservices architecture that is open and fully standards-based. Its focus is to reduce time-to-market, simplify operations and scale multivendor applications. Netcracker Business Cloud can help service providers get more value from the B2B market in the following four ways. Netcracker has incorporated the leading SD-WAN and value-added services (VAS) vendors into its Business Cloud offering. This means service providers can get started with SD-WAN and security offerings 70% faster, as the hefty pre-integration work and creation and testing of VNF descriptors have all been completed. In addition, Netcracker’s solution can orchestrate across multiple SD-WAN and VAS vendors using TM Forum and MEF Open APIs. It incorporates unified license management capabilities, enabling operators to offer their enterprise customers a choice of services based on market demands. Netcracker Business Cloud uses both network and service orchestration functions to automate the full service lifecycle management from onboarding to instantiating, scaling, healing, upgrading and terminating services. By incorporating TOSCA and YANG models, Netcracker can enable enhanced agility within NaaS offerings. Netcracker Business Cloud extends beyond the connectivity market with a vast partner ecosystem across many domains including SaaS, IaaS and IoT. Service providers can expand their addressable B2B market by 40% with high margin services, becoming a single interface for an enterprise’s application needs with a unified digital experience. Below is a sample of ready-to-go services that have been pre-validated with myriad partners. These services that can be bundled to create customized offerings that target specific markets, including small business, large enterprise or more specialized vertical markets. Service providers and enterprises can even add their own in-house applications into the service bundle. The solution leverages open-source technologies, open APIs and service design automation capabilities for fast partner onboarding, helping operators to build upon their own portfolio of cloud services. Partners can be suppliers, resellers and distributors. Service offerings are made available in a unified product catalog together with the VNF services. Using Netcracker’s Revenue Management solution, service providers can support flexible business models and automate financial settlements between all parties.

1. Reduce time-to-market with a strong ecosystem of pre-integrated partners and B2B cloud services ready to go.
2. Address and monetize bigger service opportunities by bundling cloud connectivity with enterprise applications.

1. Deliver a differentiated digital user experience by giving enterprises control and visualization capabilities from a single GUI.

Netcracker helps service providers offer a new digital experience to their enterprise customers by automating the end-to-end lead-to-cash process and delivering personalized customer journeys. Enterprise customers get full control of their services and a unified experience with the help of two portals—a self-service portal and a digital marketplace. Netcracker’s intuitive Self-Service portal provides a single user interface to manage different types of VNF and SD-WAN services from multiple vendors. The portal gives customers more control as well as the ability to define network topology and monitor service performance using analytics-driven visual dashboards. Netcracker’s Digital Marketplace provides a full e-commerce, catalog-driven shopping experience with configuration, pricing and quotation (CPQ) capabilities for all types of VNF, XaaS and IoT services. The catalog provides unified storage and configuration of cloud product offers, prices and licenses. It allows potential and signed customers to select and configure offerings with just a couple of clicks. Netcracker Business Cloud is built on a cloud-native platform with a microservices-based architecture. Operators can choose the parts they need with simplified BSS/OSS integration and full flexibility to interwork with third-party software using open APIs. For some service providers, however, building and launching virtualized and cloud services that involve complex transformation projects are time-consuming and costly. Operators often need to undergo lengthy vendor selections; get their cloud platforms ready; become familiar with new technology; and test, validate and integrate the solutions with existing BSS/OSS infrastructure. And this cannot be achieved without reskilling the workforce, changing business processes and making significant upfront investments. For service providers that need to enter the B2B cloud market faster, Netcracker Business Cloud provides an alternative to building and running their own cloud by delivering the entire SDN/NFV/IT stack as a hosted service. Netcracker can host and run the operator’s services in Netcracker’s data centers, or in a multicloud environment using the operator’s own data centers and public clouds. This accelerated launch plan means operators can launch innovative new services, such as SD-WAN with security, in as little as eight weeks. Given that it typically takes 18 months to deploy and launch an SD-WAN service, Netcracker Business Cloud presents a game-changing alternative for many operators. Netcracker helps its customers further by providing a portfolio of professional services that can help overcome the commercial, operational and organizational challenges faced during go-to-market (GTM) initiatives. Leveraging its rich experience and deep knowledge in the telecom domain, Netcracker provides a GTM framework that covers all key commercial and operational pillars, including consulting on market offers as well as assistance with sales training, creation of marketing and sales collaterals and execution of customer trials. Our game-changing approach to the NaaS market with Netcracker Business Cloud helps service providers better compete in the digital economy and provides and important foundation for new 5G services.

1. Leverage flexible deployment models, including hosted/managed cloud services and multi-cloud strategies.