Oracle explores move from autonomous network to autonomous ops

Differentiation through customer experience is essential and technology and customer shifts in this area are seismic, according to Andrew de la Torre, Group Vice President of Technology at Oracle Communications, explains how automation and AI, including GenAI and agentic AI, are at the heart of the matter.

TM Forum: What does the telco transformation journey look like today and where are we heading?

ADLT: While transformation is a never-ending journey, there are some interesting components to it right now. The first is the aspiration to evolve from business models focused on consumer and enterprise communications to offering richer capabilities in both sectors, plus monetization strategies more focused on vertical industries. Service providers are working to position themselves as enterprise partners, able to support entire business transformation programs and bring operational technology solutions to the table that are communications-enabled, rather than just deliver connectivity.

Then there’s the constant endeavor to shift the business and operating model from reactive and manual to automated and insight driven, and ultimately to fully autonomous operations. Service providers are also asking themselves how they can become more customer-centric, fully digital businesses? The telecom industry has shown recent enthusiasm for adopting AI and GenAI – technologies that are a critical component of the new operating model, impacting all the touchpoints for customers, in the field, business and network operations.

However, autonomous operations need a thoughtful approach: Service providers must understand that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to applying the most advanced form of AI. Judicious use of the right technologies in the right areas will lead to the most successful autonomous operations, and deliver the best operational outcomes and security. This is true from simplistic algorithmic automation through to machine learning and GenAI.

TM Forum: What progress has been made and where do we need to focus to progress further?

ADLT: With the drive to become more digitally enabled, service providers are realizing that their products need a refresh – a move from being tech-centric to business- and customer-centric. We’re seeing more offerings that augment people’s daily lives – think more loyalty schemes, more lifestyle-product suites in the consumer space.

In the enterprise space, service providers are positioning products to help enterprises on their own transformation journeys, from reselling cloud capabilities, to monetizing 5G with network APIs or bringing unified communications or contact center ‘as-a-service’ to the enterprise.

There’s a marked shift away from just connectivity into business applications and broader technology capabilities. There’s also far less ‘rack and stack,’ and more of a packaged approach, with components such as network, business applications and service assurance bundled together. The aim is to deliver the quality and availability that enterprises need at the services layer.

The shift to cloud-native and composable IT architectures continues apace. Service providers are modernizing IT stacks, putting much more emphasis on flexible and fungible architectures. This strong focus on APIs and openness is a key to them being able to rapidly assemble new customer journeys and operational workflows. This gives them the flexibility to support business models no one’s even thought of yet.

At the same time, we are also seeing considerable demand for pre-integrated solutions that make it easy to configure and customize to match customers’ market needs. They want to deliver business outcomes rapidly alongside reducing time to value, the total cost of solutions’ ownership and integration costs.

TM Forum: As the industry continues the transformation on technology and business model fronts, where does customer experience come into all of this?

ADLT: Customer experience is more important than it’s ever been. Core products (network connectivity) are so mature that differentiation through customer experience is essential, yet the technology and customer shifts in this area are seismic. As agentic AI becomes mainstream, there is the scope to offer unparalleled channel capabilities. Not to mention the massive impact that GenAI can have on agent productivity with agent assist.

The other big challenge is the change in the customer base. Industrial applications don’t call a contact center when they have an issue with their service, or a sales rep when they need a different offering. This drives service providers to to be truly digital to interact in these scenarios and it begs the question, ‘What does customer experience even look like in this space?’.

In this context we are seeing significant traction with our Digital Business Experience solution – an AI-powered customer experience management stack. Service providers can manage the lifecycle from concept to order, cash and care. Its capabilities span marketing, sales, order management, monetization, customer support and back-office operations.

Our goal with this solution was to leverage our strengths in servicing the current communications ecosystem, then add the ability to support the next generation of services. It’s a solution for today’s complex products and journeys. Being cloud native and compliant with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) means it is ready to integrate with adjunct software platforms to support next generation services.

TM Forum: You talked about transforming the operations model – can you speak a little bit more about achieving autonomous operations?

ADLT: To be a truly digital business you must strive for autonomy from end to end. The changes in market focus, product types and continued effort regarding customer experience means transforming the operating model a prerequisite: Service providers need a model based on the principles of end-to-end service lifecycle management.

It has to start with autonomous network domains – for example, the lifecycle automation of a 5G network function including self-healing and self-scaling. Each domain needs a degree of autonomy to manage itself and solve for routine things, because addressing these capabilities at the next layer up can become too complex and expensive.

Service providers can begin by ‘stacking the autonomy’ with intent-driven capabilities at each layer. They should start with the network/infrastructure layer (for autonomous networks), followed by the service management layer (for autonomous operations), then address the customer and business operations layer (autonomous business).

Oracle offers autonomous solutions that map to each of these layers – 5G, the Unified Operations OSS portfolio and the Digital Business Experience respectively. The goal is to power intent-based, communications-enabled applications and enterprise operations.

We are demonstrating a ground-breaking autonomous operations use case as part of the SATCOM with an edge (Phase III) Catalyst project at DTW Ignite. We will be using our Unified Operations solution to monitor a composite, multi-orbit SATCOM and 5G service end-to-end for potential breaches of service level agreements and to trigger remediation action through closed loop operations before failures happen.