SERVICE PROVIDER SURVEY RESULTS
managed SD-WAN services
After years of hesitation over possible cannibalization of their traditional offerings, communications service providers (CSPs) are increasingly looking for ways to seize the managed SD-WAN services opportunity.
A new comprehensive survey by Heavy Reading on managed SD-WAN services looks at how CSPs are building and managing SD-WAN services: how they’re monetizing them, where they’re encountering challenges and where they see opportunities for differentiation.
It’s also evident that while some CSPs have already deployed robust, scalable SD-WAN services, many challenges remain on how to manage them as they grow to encompass multiple domains, clouds and vendor solutions.
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CSPs plan to leverage their managed SD-WAN services to drive new sustainable revenue from these top three streams:
aim to address their customers' demands for
SD-WAN-as-a-Service
are focusing on industry verticals for
their managed SD-WAN services
Retail (45%), manufacturing (38%) and healthcare (32%) are the leading verticals being pursued by CSPs.
As CSPs continue to enhance and increase their managed SD-WAN customer base, they’re also increasing the number of SD-WAN vendor solutions they deploy in their network.
While demand for managed SD-WAN services is on the rise, differentiation remains critical in this highly competitive market, requiring CSPs to offer a choice of SD-WAN and value-added virtualized services from multiple vendors to meet their customers’ specific needs.
CSPs are looking to differentiate their managed SD-WAN service by enabling their customers to:
Along with the opportunity for growth, the task of building and delivering SD-WAN offerings presents new and unique challenges. These include onboarding and integrating new vendor and partner solutions, creating new offerings, and delivering, managing and monetizing these services. Additional challenges include correlating underlay and overlay events and managing full end-to-end service performance across multiple systems.
CSPs nominated these technical capabilities as most critical to ensuring the success of their managed SD-WAN services
Ability to deploy SD-WAN edge software and additional VNFs on all infrastructure spanning uCPE AND telco cloud AND main public clouds (e.g. AWS, Azure, etc.)
Use a single, vendor-agnostic, orchestration solution across multiple SD-WAN vendor / technology solutions
Use one single/unified service order management solution and operations ‘pane of glass’ for both hybrid SD-WAN offerings and traditional connectivity services
Enable customers to order and co-manage SD-WAN and value-added services via a self-service portal
Operations complexity managing multiple SD-WAN vendor solutions
Inadequate integration of SD-WAN systems with OSS/BSS to enable timely service handling, rapid delivery and expected experience
Limited ability to provide business customers with the digital and ‘as-a Service’ experience they are used to from hyperscale cloud providers
The challenges above are motivating CSPs to transform their current service operations – and decouple SD-WAN solution complexity and restrictions from their business enablement systems.
Many CSPs differentiate by providing their customers with managed SD-WAN and underlay connectivity services.
Additional operational challenges include:
The survey results indicate that CSPs are coming to the realization that to overcome these challenges, they must accelerate service automation and assign top priority to obtaining end-to-end service orchestration and visibility capabilities that will enable them to efficiently manage hybrid networks spanning multiple dimensions: covering physical + virtual + cloud functions; deployed on-premises; deployed within the network or on the cloud.
In doing so, these players will gain a single view of data and processes, unified management of policies/SLAs/KPIs, automated closed-loop operations, and simplification of service lifecycle management for both the underlay connectivity and overlay SD-WAN and value-added services.
Based on ETSI, MEF, TMF and ONAP standards, NEO converges open-source and vendor-agnostic service modeling to reduce the complexity and cost of service lifecycle automation and orchestration of multi-vendor environments comprising SD-WANs, as well as various VAS VNFs and CNFs, thereby enabling service innovation, differentiation and agility.
The solution’s unified services and resources inventory, combined with closed-loop operations, maximizes both network underlay and service overlay performance.
NEO’s cloud-native, microservices-based architecture ensures the highest levels of scalability and operational efficiency, while integration with various networks and clouds enables more flexible SD-WAN and security network function deployment – both on the customer premises, as well as on telco and public clouds.
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