The global SD-WAN market is slated to grow at a nearly 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2025, expanding from $1.9 billion in 2020 to $8.4 billion in 2025, according to Markets and Markets. Communications service providers (CSPs) want to benefit from this growth and win as great a share of the expanding market as possible. This puts SD-WAN service delivery, time to market, and customer experience in the spotlight for CSPs who face strong competition for sophisticated customers who want more autonomy in how they consume technology services.
Automating SD-WAN delivery has become imperative for CSPs because it is a dynamic service based on virtualization technology that has blazed the path to cloud-native enterprise networking. Intraway’s Symphonica provides a textbook example of how a true, no-code, cloud-native service provisioning, activation, and orchestration solution automates SD-WAN service delivery to underpin a world-class customer experience in this rapidly growing service category.
Want to learn more about Symphonica? Check out Symphonica’s Demo Series, a series on the top orchestration use cases including an intro to Symphonica, GPON, SD-WAN, Metro Area Networks Ethernet E-line and 5G Network Slicing & Closed-loop.
Start with an order
Symphonica is always at the ready to act in response to an event, like an order for SD-WAN service passed to it from a digital experience layer, CRM component, or billing platform. Symphonica is open and TM Forum compliant, so that orders can be exchanged using the TM Forum Service Ordering Open API (641). As a result, Symphonica can be agnostic as to the type of system that sends it an order.
An order for SD-WAN service can kick off a series of predictable tasks, each of which Symphonica manages. The key is how many edge endpoints need to be configured and how many tunnels will connect them. In a basic example, we have two edge sites connected by a tunnel. As a result, the order decomposes to three key activities – provisioning each of the edge sites and connecting them with a tunnel.
One of the important sidenotes for this kind of order is that it involves linear dependencies; the tunnels cannot be configured until the edge sites are in place. This contrasts from an order for a SIM and mobile device, for example, as either order can be executed independent of the other component, through the service will not be complete until both are joined and active. Symphonica can manage and automate either type of order – those with and without linear dependencies.
Visualize and Automate the Process
The individual process components and dependencies are visualized with Symphonica’s design tools. In addition to providing drag-and-drop style design with no coding required to create new provisioning flows, Symphonica’s process visualizer also provides live status for any order. In this case, provisioning tasks can be color coded, such as black for “pending,” yellow for “needs doing next,” and green for “complete.” This makes it easy for a technician or other user to see exactly where any order is in its automated provisioning process, whether it is waiting on any dependencies, and whether those dependencies might require intervention.
Any task in the process is accessible from the Symphonica Tech Assist app. From this app, techs can claim tasks by scanning a QR code, which will provide information like site or node IDs, and follow those tasks through to completion. Task progress and status can be tracked step by step as well, with notifications of any additional tasks a tech might need to complete to close out the order. In this case, the tech’s job is largely to ensure that step-by-step, automated provisioning of the edge sites is completed successfully.
Finish the job
Once the edge sites are configured and validated by Symphonica as active, the tunnel between the edge sites can be configured. Once again, the tech can achieve all these steps through the app. To the user, the automation is nearly zero-touch, other than having an expert technician supervising its progress and potentially intervening in case of trouble.
Once the end-to-end service has been configured and activated, Symphonica can show the console or Tech Assist app user that each step in the process has been completed and validated to result in an active service. A check of the Intraway customer inventory will show an active end-to-end service, with detail for each of its constituent pieces, as a live record of the completed provisioning process and the current, still-active status (or not) of the service itself.
At this point, the service order is complete and billing can start.
Measure results and improve
Stepping beyond the process itself, Symphonica provides the necessary tools to measure performance and diagnose issues in individual order flows or end-to-end processes. The Symphonica dashboard provides order-specific views, like activation and processing status, but also organizational views that show overall performance and for various types of orders for different customers or localities. The additional insight into the crucial operations processes Symphonica automates in turn fuels cloud-native ways of working, like continuous improvement methodologies. As a result, CSPs can leverage Symphonica not only as a way to automate core processes and support improved customer experiences, but to improve them continuously over time as well.
Want to learn more about Symphonica? Check out Symphonica’s Demo Series, a series on the top orchestration use cases including an intro to Symphonica, GPON, SD-WAN, Metro Area Networks Ethernet E-line and 5G Network Slicing & Closed-loop.
