Intraway Symphonica is a true, no-code, cloud-native service provisioning, activation, and orchestration solution for communications service providers (CSPs). It reflects how modern, cloud-native software design and lifecycle management principles can meet CSPs’ classic and forward-looking operations needs in service provisioning, activation, and orchestration while resetting to an improved technological and economic trajectory.
Symphonica as a cloud-native, provisioning, activation, and orchestration solution
Figure 1 shows where Symphonica typically fits in a communications service provider’s (CSP’s) operations support systems (OSS) environment, where it is responsible for service fulfillment, which is the provisioning, activation, and orchestration of services on the network. In the modern paradigm, orchestration is added because services are themselves made of distributed, virtualized, and cloud-based components that must be governed to ensure continuous service delivery.
Want to learn more about Symphonica? Check out Symphonica’s Demo Series, a video 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.
Upon closer inspection, Figure 1 shows how Symphonica performs and automates a range of classic OSS functions:
- Service catalog & inventory: In these data stores, a CSP defines what each service is and whether it has the network and service capacity available to deliver an order for it. If it does not, it could spur an internal order for anything from providing access to new cloud resources to building new physical plant.
- Service and resource order managers: When an order is placed, it is broken down – or decomposed – into constituent parts that need fulfilling. These parts may include service components, like retail applications; network components, like configuration of additional access services; and customer devices, like new point of sale terminals. Symphonica automates these order fulfillment processes and their interaction with networks, clouds, and application platforms.
- Design studio: A design studio is valuable to an OSS because it enables rapid creation of new, repeatable service fulfillment automations for services and components of services. These can be extended, reused, and improved continuously. This design-led approach provides distinct advantages over legacy OSS, which often grew organically, ad-hoc, and without effective ways to automate processes or reuse previously designed services.
- Notification service and test manager: Symphonica supports operations teams pragmatically with tools like notifications and test management. Notifications can enable them to get ahead of failures before customer impacts occur and to automate testing of new configurations before enabling them in the service catalog.
- Open integrations: Symphonica facilitates integration because it is TM Forum Open API certified. Open APIs provide standard ways for operations systems to integrate. Symphonica can co-exist with any TM Forum Open API-compliant system. In Figure 1, Symphonica integrates with product catalogs, order managers, service platforms, and network devices via Open APIs. These open integrations not only lower cost, they enable Symphonica to play a central role in automating CSP service and network operations.
Delivering expected benefits
The entire IT world is shifting away from monolithic systems to solutions built on open and reusable components. Symphonica has always been on this path. It is built on reusable microservices which can run in different types of open container environments and itself runs in the AWS cloud. This aligns it with the communications industry’s overall direction as IT, services, and networks all shift to cloud-native microservices architectures.
But CSPs worldwide are now adopting cloud-native solutions and hyperscale clouds primarily because they expect real business, technical agility, and cost advantages to result. Symphonica’s ability to combine classic telecom operations competence with modern enterprise cloud technology delivers the benefits CSPs expected when they made their own cases to adopt cloud-native OSS.
- It is less costly to operate because, among other reasons, it runs in the public cloud.
- It is easier and faster to adapt, thanks to no-code, drag-and-drop functionality.
- It is far simpler to maintain and improve, thanks to common code streams.
- It brings mature business assets to the fore, with more than 150 out-of-the-box connectors, to OSS, BSS, service platforms, and network elements, as well as the ability to create new connectors within days rather than months.
- It facilitates automation design for networks, services, and operations because it provides visual design tools built for the purpose.
- It is meant to design and fulfill classic and new types of services, which may comprise many components and span multiple clouds.
Looking forward
The strength Symphonica brings to a CSP becomes even more evident when we explore use cases ranging from Metro Area Networks Ethernet E-line and SD-WAN to GPON and 5G network slicing, which we will do in upcoming articles.
For example, stand-alone 5G networks are microservices-based from end to end. The need for automation solutions that can cope with these complex distributed environments yet bring classic telecom operations discipline and automation to them will be crucial. Symphonica has a key role to play in them all.
Want to learn more about Symphonica? Check out Symphonica’s Demo Series, a demo video 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.
