logo_header
  • Topics
  • Research & Analysis
  • Features & Opinion
  • Webinars & Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Event videos

Providing maximum agility to communications service providers

CSPs need a truly dynamic architecture to deliver on the promise of designing and deploying new offerings much more quickly, without manual intervention.

Annie Turner
28 Aug 2020
Providing maximum agility to communications service providers

Providing maximum agility to communications service providers

There is a clear imperative for communications service providers (CSPs) to be able to design and deploy new offerings much more quickly, without manual intervention from service catalog, network or technology teams. CSPs need a truly dynamic architecture to deliver on this promise.

This project – called The Dynamic Architecture Catalyst – is championed by Telstra and Vodafone, and showcases how TM Forum’s standards, coupled with capabilities from industry partners, can deliver on the promise of dynamic architecture for digital services, specifically SD WAN.

SD WAN services used in this Catalyst, consistent with the MEF 70 specification, have overlay (virtual network) and underlay (physical infrastructure) components that need to be seamlessly unified to bring them to market quickly.

Together with Deloitte, DGIT Systems, Fujitsu and ServiceNow, this Catalyst demonstrates how to accelerate time to market, leveraging TM Forum standards, ITIL best practices and service assurance and orchestration capabilities.

Establishing a common language


To start, the SD WAN service is defined, deployed, assured and managed cohesively by using both TM Forum Open APIs and ITIL service management to bridge the catalog, network service and service assurance domains.

Greg Tilton, CEO of DGIT and Leader of the Catalyst project explains, “In this Catalyst we're showing how the ITIL CMDB [configuration management database] can be linked into a catalog-driven architecture so that any new digital service can be immediately supported through the assurance systems.”
“The reason for this approach is time to market; we’ve found that for so many CSPs there is a huge barrier to achieving this because the assurance team needs to do specialist integration [to make the two worlds interoperable], which immediately breaks the fast-to-market effect of the catalog driven architecture. We are working with ServiceNow, the dominant ITIL assurance system to solve this problem,” says Tilton.

Today, more than 90% of fault ticketing systems within telcos are ITIL based. As Dr. Lester Thomas, Chief Systems Architect, Vodafone Group, says, “Vodafone are big users of ITIL assurance in business services,” and adds, “Vodafone is seeking a way to integrate model-driven services with the CMDB to accelerate time to market.”

Unifying service delivery with a single pane


When new capabilities are added to the network, service specifications are discovered from the service orchestrator by the service catalog, and the templates are automatically created with all the new service characteristics in ServiceNow.

DGIT’s Telflow uses these service specifications to rapidly create the new product offering so that customers can order. The Fujitsu Service Orchestrator instantiates and delivers the abstracted end to end network services across multiple network domains
Once services have been templated on the ServiceNow platform, the customer and network services can be provisioned and fully assured. “ServiceNow provides the single pane of glass to assure quality delivery and to proactively manage the customer experience all the way down to the network,” states Niels Roskam, Senior Business Architect, Telecom, for ServiceNow.

This leverages the best practices of ITIL service management that have long been used to manage technology services, to assure quality delivery of telecom network services, unifying both customer-generated and network-generated issues.

Multiple network domains


One of the biggest challenges for service providers is the ability to respond dynamically to changing service and product needs. The service orchestrator performs the role of understanding what network resources are available and how best to coordinate, design and deliver end to end network services across multiple network domains.

In the orchestrator, the service order is decomposed into the following components: An underlay network infrastructure Ethernet service; an edge compute service utilizing virtualized functions; and then via the SD-WAN controller – the overlay SD-WAN service.

In addition, the Forum’s Open APIs allow dynamic discovery of the Fujitsu service models and adjustment of the instantiated services.
“The efficient, no-touch resolution of service-impacting resource issues is critical to delivering the expected service performance,” says Elaine Haher of Fujitsu Network Communications. “Fujitsu’s full lifecycle management of network services is essential to automating configuration in today’s multi-domain networks.”

Making the value real


Enabling the delivery ecosystem of partners to deliver on the promise of dynamic architecture is essential for CSPs to keep pace with the innovation required to bring new services to market quickly. This requires unifying the deep capabilities partners bring, in combination with standards like TM Forum’s Open APIs and ITIL.

According to Chris Anderson, Managing Director at Deloitte Consulting, “The ability to bring new services to market quickly, as well as manage the experience of those services without intervention from technical teams, is a strategic differentiator for CSPs as they move to operationalize 5G-enabled services.”

This Catalyst is scheduled to deliver a proof of concept demonstration of the solution at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World in October. For a sneak-peak check out the team video presentation, part of the Forum’s Catalyst Digital Showcase. Watch a brief Catalyst preview in the video below