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Read about how Vocus is introducing a dynamic, programmable and sliceable network, enabled through TM Forum's Open APIs and aligned with the Open Digital Architecture.
Vocus slashes service activation to seconds and eyes AU$60 million savings
Over the past three years, Vocus Group (Vocus), a communications service provider (CSP) in the Australia-New Zealand region specializing in fiber and network solutions, has made 15 acquisitions as part of its aggressive growth plans, rapidly integrating the newly attained fiber and submarine assets to build out its network.
While M&A has contributed to Vocus’ gain in market share,
it has also contributed to several business challenges relating to the ability to scale due to maintaining six legacy networks and eight legacy BSS stacks. Vocus COO Ellie Sweeney, explained: “
Like a lot of telcos who have grown through acquisition, activation and assurance, for us, relies on a higher level of manual intervention than we would like. To provision new services, our team often have to “swivel chair” between multiple systems across multiple legacy BSS stacks. We operate multiple networks, utilizing different equipment, which at the most basic level, is just inefficient to lifecycle manage. “Vocus is growing rapidly. We need a network that can better scale with greater agility to become the challenger our customers deserve,” she summarized, echoing the challenge that many operators globally now face. To satisfy that challenge, Vocus formulated its ‘Future State’ strategy, to consolidate the various networks and systems into one. As well as this, it introduces automation to enable customers to dynamically control their network services through real-time bandwidth changes, and to always benefit from the latest technology and products.
The ‘programmable’ network aligns with TM Forum’s vision of the Open Digital Architecture (ODA), using software-defined networking (SDN)/network functions virtualization (NFV), artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, underpinned by Open APIs, as a more agile replacement for traditional operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) architecture.
The Future State strategy has three phases. The first, which is underway and on track to be complete within the next 12 months, is zero-touch automated provisioning of customer services, to deliver them almost instantaneously.
Giving control back to our customers, it will enable Vocus with the ability to offer on-demand enterprise connectivity services, rather than classic fixed-term contracts. Phase two is to create a partner platform which will allow Vocus to expand its customer offerings by pulling in third-party applications such as load balancing, security and SDN. “
Becoming a more active participant in the global partner ecosystem provides us with a much faster GTM capability, ” Sweeney said. “Where it makes sense for us to build applications we will, and where it doesn’t, those third party applications will appear in our product catalog, enabling our customers to place orders, seamlessly orchestrated with our network.
” Phase two is also underway and is scheduled to be complete next year. The third phase is closed-loop automation so that system issues can be avoided through predictive action and automatically fixed if they do break. In the rare case, when there is an issue, proactive/ predictive action will minimize any customer impact. Vocus anticipates that phase three will be complete in 2022.
Vocus has chosen three strategic partners to implement the underlying technical capabilities to make its Future State strategy a reality: Vocus is committed to open standards and open source capabilities, and this is in part the reason the vendors have been selected, giving Vocus the modularity and flexibility it requires. Vocus’ architecture implements TM Forum Open APIs for three key use cases in line with its Future Strategy transformation: managing orders, tickets, services and billing to enable self-service options for customers; zero-touch partnering to extend capabilities; and enabling dynamic model-driven networks. These capabilities were introduced in the award-winning 2018 Network as a service (NaaS) in action TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst, where Blue Planet, DGIT and other participants jointly defined a number of integration points based on Open APIs and Open Digital Architecture (ODA).
Through the Catalyst they demonstrated these integrations could be used to discover network models to then be dynamically utilized within customer-facing services, products or offers without any additional development effort. Vocus’ architecture includes Open APIs for service activation and configuration; service ordering management; service catalog; inventory management; service qualification; product ordering; product catalog management; product offering qualification; and product inventory management.
This enables zero-touch provisioning for new services and change requests that can be automated in minutes rather than weeks. The network architecture uses repeatable orchestrations which serve as component “building blocks” within the catalog, rather than bespoke custom product development through coding, enabling offer creation in days rather than months. Further, catalog-driven configuration means no IT development and more effective lifecycle management. Introducing partner plug-and-play capabilities extends Vocus’ network coverage – providing access to rich new B2B services and increasing revenues from customers and new partners.
The NaaS Catalyst also demonstrated how the Open APIs can interact with MEF standards for the automated orchestration of services across multiple providers and over diverse network technology domains, which is important for realizing Vocus’ Future State vision. In the future, the network will use big data and AI to automate activation and operations and support autonomous, closed-loop networking with proactive self-healing and self-optimizing capabilities to reduce complexity and costs.
The foundational platform is now in place, with approximately 33 Arista sites built and connected to the orchestration and intelligent automation platform, and the product catalog and billing platforms, installed and running.
The next steps are to implement the products in the payloads more completely and implement other systems capabilities, such as interfaces with the CRM system, ticketing and workflow management systems and inventory management systems, etc.
By consolidating the legacy networks and BSS stacks, Vocus has calculated expected savings of almost AU$60 million, including OpEx savings of AU$30 million (US$19.85 million) and CapEx savings of AU$30 million by 2023, compared to proceeding with things the way they are done now. This proves the business case but is only the tip of the iceberg as far as benefits go.
“For customers, the experience will improve dramatically because they will be able to do a service qualification order in real-time, with no wait period or manual contract-signing,” Sweeney said, adding: “As well as increasing our ability to scale we will also be able to add new products and features quickly and seamlessly; we will be doing it once instead of six times.”
To deliver these benefits, Vocus will work closely with its three foundational partners, including moving towards more outcome-focused contracts which are new for both CSPs and vendors. This example of partnering and co-creation approach between CSPs and suppliers will also help drive forward the ecosystem approach envisioned within TM Forum’s ODA for the benefit of the wider membership.
