The road to autonomous networks: industry perspectives from Inspur

Bruce Li, GM of Inspur’s overseas business, has more than 18 years’ experience in the telecoms industry and a deep understanding of telcos’ OSS/BSS architecture and their role in autonomous networks (AN).

He says that although more and more communication service providers (CSPs) recognize the importance of deploying AN since TM Forum proposed the AN concept and released its first white paper, on the subject addressing the whole network and services remains difficult. Here Li explains his company track record in addressing these issues ahead of Innovate Asia 2025, at which Inspur is a Gold sponsor.

TM Forum: What can you tell us about the evolutionary trends in AN so far and CSPs’ plans?

BL: In early 2019, the telecom industry put forward the concept of AN. Many standard development organizations – like TM Forum, 3GPP, ETSI, IETF, ITU-T, CCSA and GSMA – gathered consensus about network automation and intelligence, built AN projects, established specifications and cooperated to incubate AN pilots.

In that year, TM Forum set up the AN project and released the AN 1.0 white paper, which defines AN frameworks, construction methodology, level definition and an AN maturity matrix. Version 7.0 of the white paper was published in 2025.

More CSPs agree on the importance of deploying AN; 37% of them have an ambitious automation strategy with significant investment plans that will result in a full transformation of operations; 54% envisage continual improvement and automation of operations with increased investment; and only 9% have no specific vision apart from a continued commitment to cutting costs.

Pioneering telcos like China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, AIS, Vodafone, Orange and MTN plan to achieve Level 3 and Level 4 in TM Forum’s AN model in the next three to five years.

TM Forum: Why are the white papers so important?

By tracing the white paper’s evolution, we gain some idea of AN’s evolution, with versions 1.0 to 4.0 spanning a period of exploration and growth, from the first AN concept, to defining AN levels and effectiveness indicators, and two clear business objectives (Business Growth and Operations Efficiency). In this time the industry built a comprehensive evaluation matrix, including six operations and maintenance (O&M) domains, 11 scenarios, 37 capabilities and nearly 900 sub-scenarios.

TM Forum: What were the goals of these developments?

BL: The aims of this work were to provide zero-wait, zero-touch and zero-trouble customer experience for vertical industry users and consumers through intelligent infrastructure, agile operations and all-inclusive services based on fully automated networks and ICT. The vision was to support self-service, self-fulfilling and self-assuring network infrastructures for internal users across various departments, including planning, marketing, operations and management.

Evaluation matrix shows it’s a huge job for CSPs to adopt all the AN scenarios, covering full network and service domain. This is why the AN whitepaper versions 5.0 to 7.0 raised the concept of high value-scenarios that align with customers’ key business requirements related to service and network.

The scope of the network domain can be specified by selecting key services based on factors such as the users’ scale, service revenue and service prospect, as well as eliminating networks that are about to be out of service, based on the CSP’s live network conditions. CSPs can then prioritize high-value scenarios based on operations value and technical feasibility. They can evaluate operational value by assessing the benefits AN provides in improving service quality, increasing revenues, reducing O&M costs and enhancing efficiency.

TM Forum: Can you specify Inspur’s best AN experience during this period?

BL: Inspur is a pioneer of OSS AN, launching research on the subject since 2017, based on deep participation in the industry’s AN construction. Inspur contributes to all TM Forum white papers and now is one of the largest OSS vendors in the Chinese market. Based on its years of OSS experience, Inspur is committed to promoting customers’ continuous improvement and development, and sharing best practices with the whole industry from strategy to implementation.

Keeping pace with China Mobile’s AN construction, Inspur proposed a ‘2+5+N’ architecture mapped to the operator’s AN strategy.

The ‘2’ refers to two platforms – one for data sharing and a general technology platform. The data sharing platform is based on Big Data components, such as Hadoop Hive and HBase to provide computing power, data development, governance and data sharing.

The general technology platform has three key modules: DevOps, low-code and AI. DevOps focus on R&D and provide a CI/CD pipeline. Low-code development generates an agile workflow based on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, while the AI platform offers AI capabilities and algorithms for various business applications.

The ‘5’ stands for the five application centers which combine to form the core OSS service layer. The Resource Center provides centralized inventory management and support for service fulfillment and service assurance. Following ONAP specifications, the Service Orchestration Center supports various types of modular design capabilities for services, CFS/RFS and policy.

The Quality Center provides closed-loop processes and helps build end-to-end support for service quality management and assurance for network performance, service quality, and customers’ perception and experience.

The Fault Center offers a fault closed loop based on policy definition which executes autonomous fault resolution, from definition to identification, pre-process, diagnose and demarcation, handling and recovery validation. Finally, the O&M Center is a workflow platform that delivers agile business process design, orchestration, execution and end-to-end management of all O&M processes and scenarios.

The ’N’ refers to multiple controllers for different network domains, based on SDOs’ specifications, such as controllers for wireless, IP, transport and the core. The domain controller supports unified, centralized operation and maintenance for different network domains and in multi-vendor environments.

Inspur has worked on ANs with many CSPs, especially China Mobile. It will continue to invest in this area to develop more high-value scenarios and bring more intuitive value to customers.

TM Forum: What challenges did Inspur face during the AN build?

BL: AN is not an easy road for CSPs or OSS vendors. In the short term, CSPs need huge investment to evolve their network and services; OSS vendors must develop and upgrade traditional OSSs to fit AN requirements. Inspur faces the same challenge.

Fortunately, from the very beginning, Inspur identified AN as a core strategy for the company's development, participating in industry co-builds, to evolve and transform legacy OSS product to ‘2+5+N’ architecture for better adoption of AN requirements.

As mentioned, the company strives to spread the best practice to CSPs globally, but it is hard to duplicate its experience in China overseas. This is because Chinese CSPs are mature organizations with adequate budgets and secondly, Chinese CSPs do not use many different OSS products and vendors.

TM Forum: Why is the focus on high-value scenarios the solution?

BL: A focus on high-value scenarios avoids starting with almost 900 sub-scenarios, or having to break down the entire network and services. Instead it achieves network autonomy step by step, focusing on a specific network or service to resolve real, urgent requirements for customers.

For example, intelligent inspection for fault tickets increases the quality inspection pass rate from 90% to 99% by using automatic recognition throughout the process of ticket collection. AI monitoring, quality inspection and the indicator dashboard can be automated without any manual operation, reducing the quality inspection from three minutes to 10 seconds – a 17 times improvement in efficiency.

We can achieve AI-based traffic prediction for IP networks and their adjustment by building operator modules on an AI training platform; the operator can iterate and develop the capabilities without needing to understand the underlying code deployment. Ordinary O&M personnel can focus more on the implementation of business logic. By making maintenance work intelligent, efficiency can increase by 90%.

At Innovate Asia 2025, Xuezhi Sun, Deputy GM, Inspur will be a panellist at the Cloud-native and AI-native foundations for scalable, composable IT session, which takes place on the Impact Stage on November 26, between 12:00 pm and 1:30 pm.