The promise of lower costs with higher efficiency and network automation has been one of the rallying cries of most telecommunication operators for many years. We are in a new era of telecommunications networks, which extends to many domains: network services provisioning, network engineering and operations, and network services architecture, while being driven by various disparate requirements that range from increased service quality to service flexibility. On the other hand, there is a need to reduce capital and operational expenditures.
Today’s customers expect instant and seamless delivery of value-added telecommunication services customized to their specific needs. Communication service providers face challenges with increasing their productivity and agility to successfully respond to dynamic and changing customer expectations and needs.
It is worth noting that their current service and network management practices tend to fall short in dealing with telecommunication networks that have gradually become more software-oriented and heterogeneous. In particular, networks are more heterogeneous than ever, with multi-vendor and Open hardware, services, software, and vertical apps, as we are seeing in 5G deployments, for example.
End-to-end service orchestration is needed to help reduce errors and delays in service delivery. This is because end-to-end orchestration provides the opportunity to add the needed agility and flexibility to effectively align network infrastructure with business strategies.
What are Autonomous Networks?
These networks have the ability to operate, monitor, recover, protect, monitor, optimize, and reconfigure themselves. Note that these are commonly called self-healing networks. We can say that the impact of autonomous networks will be experienced in all areas, such as planning, audit, security, inventory, orchestration, optimization, and quality of experience. Autonomous networks can affect the role of telecommunications. The promise is that they will help enable the digitization of the industry.
Leveraging an Intent-driven Automation Approach
To accomplish the vision and goal of autonomous networks, CSPs have to adopt a unique intent-driven automation approach. This means that first, CSPs need to define the business intent. For example, this could be a CSP wanting to automate their mobile broadband operations completely.
After that, this business intent is translated into service intent and network intent, supported by assurance systems in order to monitor the state of the services and network.
What is the Goal?
Ultimately, the main objective of communication services providers is to become reliable and efficient digital service providers, providing customers with on-demand and flexible network services: easy to order, fast to provision and manage, with customized service level agreements.
End-to-end Service Orchestration
In the last few sections, we discussed ‘end-to-end orchestration’ and the advantages of autonomous networks. Keep in mind that the combination of these two is important in economically and efficiently managing increasingly complex networks and to leverage software engineering to meet their business goals.
New Possibilities with No-code Orchestration
You may have heard of a no-code cloud-native orchestration and provisioning solution. It is designed and developed to accelerate CSPs’ transformational goals in developing robust, future-proof networks.
This means that whether they have to deploy GPON, SDWAN/SASE, 5G uCPE, or Remote PHY, the solution can support them with multiple deployment scenarios and use cases. CSPs can automate service lifecycle management more effectively without investing in budget-heavy and time-consuming projects.
There are many benefits of using no-code with orchestration. One of the most important benefits of leveraging this solution is agility. Using graphical tools considerably simplifies the creation and modification of business processes that drive network services provisioning.
No-code service orchestration plays an important role in developing, designing, and deploying new and improved digital services quickly, which creates more efficient digital operations.
Autonomous Networks
Keep in mind that networks are no longer passive. They are becoming increasingly intelligent. For example, they can easily collect and correlate various metrics based on events or data and trigger various optimization actions.
Service availability and automation enable operators to design and develop network capabilities like autonomous networks, dynamic provisioning, and NaaS (network as a service). These capabilities offer various benefits, such as operating expenditure reduction, operational excellence, and quicker time to market.
Final Thoughts – Empowering CSPs with No-code Orchestration
Over the last few years, telecommunication operators worldwide have responded to the exponentially growing demand for connectivity services and traffic.
There is also the added pressure and expectation to deliver new and customized services that anticipate and meet customers’ needs and preferences immediately. As you can see, this market demand exerts more pressure on business operations, requiring communication service providers to be agile and flexible and move towards autonomous networks. This is where a no-code cloud-native service orchestration and provisioning solution, such as Symphonica, can empower CSPs to advance towards autonomous networks.
Intraway’s Symphonica is a robust no-code, telco-grade orchestration and service activation platform that can automate the full lifecycle of services orchestrated across multiple technology domains and networks. Symphonica allows CSPs to integrate their business support systems to any network access technology with just a few clicks. It is also simple to design custom automated provisioning workflows.
With this solution, CSPs can successfully navigate the uncertain and complex path to a more flexible BSS architecture and reap the rewards by meeting customer demand expectations with ease.
