TM Forum Catalyst Program helps BT save millions by consolidating network inventory

Who: BT Technology & Infosys

What: Consolidation of network inventory systems using TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework, open source technology and NetSecOps

How: Collaborating in TM Forum’s Catalyst Program to develop a solution for multiple BT business units

Results: Multimillion-dollar savings in capital and operating costs, including software licensing fees, and reduction of time to onboard new network capabilities from 18 months to less than 1 week With 30 million consumer and 1.2 million enterprise customers, BT Group is the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK.

For the better part of a decade, the company has been digitally transforming its network and IT operations across four primary lines of business using a platform-based approach that relies on open source technology and TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework, including the Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs. Most recently, BT and its systems integration partner, Infosys, have used the TM Forum Catalyst Program to develop a solution for consolidating network inventory systems, resulting in “multimillion-dollar” operational savings and a reduction in the amount of time it takes to onboard network components from 18 months to just days. BT Group’s four primary lines of business, which it refers to as customer-facing units (CFUs), are described below. Each of the CFUs is supported by BT Technology, an internal unit responsible for creating and operating BT’s networks, platforms and IT systems.

• BT Consumer delivers fixed and mobile voice, data and TV services to consumers (includes mobile operator EE).
• BT Enterprise provides voice and data services to enterprises and government organizations (includes wholesale and media and broadcast).
• BT Global delivers managed network and IT infrastructure services worldwide.
• BT Openreach provides ‘last-mile’ copper and fiber connectivity.

Eliminating silos

Like most large, incumbent communications service providers (CSPs), BT has deployed thousands of network elements such as switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers from various suppliers over the years. In the past these have been mostly physical equipment, but increasingly they are logical or virtual network resources and services, supported by thousands of operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS). Indeed, when BT embarked on its overall digital transformation program, it was operating about 4,500 IT systems, most of them working in silos. Today, the company has cut the number of systems by more than half with a goal of getting down to about 700. As part of this transformation, BT and Infosys began a project in 2017 to consolidate network inventory systems and digitize business processes in order to introduce automation and improve customer experience. One of the key objectives of the project has been to consolidate the different types of network inventory – physical, logical and virtual – into a single system to ensure data integrity. BT calls the consolidated system SRIMS (Single Resource Inventory Management System).

“With automation being the mantra, and to avail of the benefits of automation, accuracy of telecom network inventory is critical,” says Ravi Ramachandran, Platform Director, BT OSS. “The accuracy can only be leveraged by having a single resource inventory system. With a single version of the truth, there is quicker time to market and better network planning and utilization, which leads to OpEx and CapEx savings.”

While Ramachandran declines to be specific about the amount BT has saved, he says it is “multimillions of dollars”, which includes CapEx savings through network asset reconciliation and OpEx savings on software licensing fees. Other goals are to provide a real-time view of network capacity so that unused components can be repurposed, and to reduce the time it takes to roll out new network capabilities and associated services. To do this, BT is adopting an Agile (see graphic below), cloud-ready approach using NetSecOps, which means applying DevOps practices to network security testing for continuous delivery.

“NetSecOps is the key enabler and will help us stay ahead,” says Vivek Murthy, Director, BT OSS. “A well-integrated and traceable inventory is a starting point towards NetSecOps. SRIMS rollout has laid a strong foundation for NetSecOps in BT, and I’m really excited with the potential it offers. This will bring agility into our design, plan and build function and allow us to deploy infrastructure much more efficiently.”

Catalyst leads the way

BT and Infosys developed SRIMS by working together in a TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept called Agile OSS for new-age services in hybrid networks. During the Catalyst, which was demonstrated at Digital Transformation World 2018, the team used TM Forum’s Information Framework (also known as SID) and YANG-based device modelling to accelerate onboarding of physical network functions (PNFs), a process that typically takes anywhere from 10 to 18 months.

The Information Framework, which is part of the Frameworx suite of standards and best practices, is a high-level information model that provides standard definitions for all the information that flows between CSPs and their business partners. It provides a common vocabulary for implementing business processes and reduces complexity in service and system integration, development and design by providing an off-the-shelf model that can be quickly adopted by all parties.

The team used the Information Framework to build a scalable, multi-model graph database for SRIMS (as opposed to a relational database model). Graph databases are useful for modelling complex, unstructured environments such as a network where many dynamic relationships exist between data. The SRIMS model provides a unified view of the complete network covering physical, logical, service and virtual entities. So far, the team has consolidated four inventory systems into SRIMS, and at least three more are slated for consolidation. The type of data stored includes: “The data model caters to access, metro and core domains and fully supports optical, Ethernet, IP and mobile networks, covering both physical and virtual network functions,” says Sreenath Gopalakrishna, Head of Software Engineering, OSS Transformation, BT OSS. “The current graph database implementation of SRIMS supports clustering, correlations and definition of property-rich relationships. Querying to find interconnected data is much faster and much more scalable as compared to the relational data model.”

• Active optical network inventory
• Virtual network inventory
• Passive network equipment inventory
• Geospatial information associated with inventory
• Service inventory

He adds: “SRIMS is an intent-based, catalog-driven solution that enables BT to flexibly provide and assure services over its hybrid converged network infrastructure. The unified system is now operating in production in BT Enterprise and is being rolled out into other units of BT.”

Within BT Enterprise, SRIMS currently holds about 350 million entities (physical, logical and virtual resources) with around 1.2 billion relationships between them and is delivering excellent performance, according to the team, especially in search operations which are now 1,000 times faster.

“A model-driven architecture with Information Framework-compliant active inventory realized via a graph database is not only allowing faster Agile delivery of services but also giving a boost to performance in service/resource inventory search, which is essential for checking product feasibility and assurance,” says Mohit Prabhat Tyagi, Group Project Manager at Infosys. “SRIMS is truly taking customer experience to the next level.”

Leveraging open source and Open APIs

While the Information Framework is useful for modelling, it doesn’t configure devices or systems, or automate them. Other data models are needed for that, and in this case the team turned to the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) YANG, which describes configuration information for network devices and services, and TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), an open source orchestration data modelling language developed by OASIS. YANG and TOSCA were used to map the service provisioning journey to the Information Framework. This was necessary to achieve NetSecOps and one-touch provisioning.

“We have built something called a Yang Catalog Editor so that wherever vendors support YANG-based device configurations, the network designers themselves can introduce new kit [network equipment] into the BT network and OSS,” says Pawan Kumar, OSS Transformation Solution Design Manager, BT OSS. “So, what used to be a 10- to 18-month cycle now can get done in a few days or a week at the most.”

TOSCA is used to automate management of the network equipment lifecycle.

“We have used YANG and TOSCA to integrate with the Information Framework, and we have come up with a working solution where all three different standards can integrate and work together,” says Sreeraj Sivadasan, OSS Transformation Software Engineering Manager, BT OSS. “SRIMS is an inventory system, but we are also supporting orchestration by keeping in sync with the network requirements. The TOSCA-based orchestration drives service implementation through TM Forum Open APIs, spanning SDN [software-defined network] controllers, NFV [network functions virtualization] and virtual infrastructure managers as well as physical network elements.”

Specifically, the team is using the TM Forum Open APIs listed below to expose network resources and services to internal systems (for example, assurance and billing systems) and to external systems such as customer premises equipment. The team also is evaluating how to use other APIs such as the Service Catalog, Resource Catalog, Service Ordering and Resource Ordering APIs.

• Resource Inventory Management API – lists the network resources that are available; when a resource has been ordered, resource inventory is updated, and this can be queried by the Resource Inventory Management API
• Service Inventory Management API – lists the network services that are available; when a network service has been ordered, service inventory is update and this can be queried by the Service Inventory Management API
• Service Activation and Configuration API – once a network service has been qualified, it needs to be reserved, activated and configured
• Resource Function Activation and Configuration APIs – enables a network function to be activated and configured
• Resource Pool Management API – provides the ability to reserve a resource at the pre-order stage

Encouraging results

The SRIMS project is a good example of how TM Forum’s Catalyst program can result in a scalable, real-world implementation of a solution to a pressing business challenge many CSPs are facing.

“BT has gone live with this industry-leading solution which will be key to NetSecOps and closed-loop automation,” says Nishi Mathur, Senior Principal Technology Architect, Infosys. “This is a critical enabler for adoption of network virtualization, 5G and the associated digital ecosystem of diverse partners. The Information Framework helped lay a solid foundation for this solution, and the concept of device YANG promoted by BT is unique to accelerate onboarding of PNFs.”

The results of the SRIMS project are encouraging (see graphic below), and BT and Infosys hope other CSPs and suppliers will join them in a second phase of the Catalyst project to be demonstrated at Digital Transformation Asia in Kuala Lumpur in December.

“The intent in the first phase was to really showcase that even if you have hybrid networks, you can automate – you can cross-leverage the standards that are there,” Mathur says. “TOSCA and YANG were developed for the virtual world, but this particular program demonstrated how automation can be extended to the physical world; it demonstrated the power of automation even for hybrid and B2C services, not just new-age services.” The team hopes to continue the Catalyst at Digital Transformation Asia in Kuala Lumpur in November by looking at how SRIMS and the Open APIs can be used to automate 5G and internet of things (IoT) use cases such as connected car, remote equipment maintenance or remote healthcare. “We are considering an Industry 4.0 focus to see how the SRIMS solution for inventory and orchestration can bring the benefits of Agile slice management to 5G,” Mathur says. If you’re interested in learning more about SRIMS or joining the Catalyst team, please contact George Glass via wgglass@tmforum.org.