Transformation brings a set of complexities that need to be addressed holistically in a top-down management approach. However, service providers recognise that as communications technology dependency deepens and demand for new experiences grows, they will need to more fully automate and digitalise their service delivery processes, including service ordering, fulfillment, orchestration, activation and assurance.

The advent of 5G and the telco cloud is also now motivating many service providers to transform their operations support systems (OSS) and related processes in order to handle the size and complexity of new networks and technology. Finding a specific use case and making sure that’s pragmatic and then choosing the right technology to enable you to fully automate is the key and 5G and telco cloud are triggers for this.

GM: What are some of the specific OSS challenges that need be addressed to better automate service management processes?

IS: The prevalence of siloed IT systems for each network and/or service domain is a major issue. Services are increasingly being supported by chaining capabilities across a hybrid network that span multiple technologies and capabilities, for example, a mix of physical, virtual and cloud functions. So, the current systems environment of ‘islands’ makes it extremely hard to control and run operational processes efficiently.

CSPs are therefore looking at these islands holistically and seeing if their processes can flow from end-to-end. Often, they don’t. With network functions virtualisation (NFV), for example, it’s still one piece of the overall network but it’s highly siloed.

There is a need for an end-to-end system to look across all of these different islands. Secondly, due to the prevalence of closed and monolithic legacy systems, we continue to have fragmented fulfillment and orchestration processes, comprising a multitude of unintegrated touch points with manual steps along the way. This leads to many service delivery inaccuracies and significant order fallout. In addition, there is a lack of real-time contextual integration and connection between orchestration and assurance systems, which limits the ability to implement proactive, assurance and operations, thereby leading to dependence on reactive problem-solving approaches only.

If you look at future services, it’s clear CSPs have to go further than ever before and systems need to be kept open in order to enable the services. If you have a key performance indicator (KPI) on latency for a high demand service like a connected factory, it’s not enough to provision the service, you have to keep measuring and assuring. Today it’s different CSP organisations that perform these functions but they need to come together to support the service proposition.

You don’t need to boil the ocean in one day to achieve this, you can do it step-by-step, but it does need to happen.

Amdocs Digital to Network Automation solution

Addressing the operational aspects of digital transformation

Menny Konorty, Head of Open Network Sales, International

GM: How does Amdocs help service providers address these challenges and what is your approach for modernising and transforming the OSS?

IS: We are doing a number of things to help service providers consolidate, modernise and transform their operations support systems, which will all help accelerate the digital-to-network automation journey for service providers.

Amdocs has evolved its proven OSS capabilities into Amdocs NEO, a unified service and network automation platform designed to manage and orchestrate hybrid networks, combining traditional service management functionality with cloud and NFV orchestration and automation capabilities. NEO is a cloud-native, microservices offering which embraces a modular, open, standards-based approach in providing service and network automation capabilities.