Managed SD-WAN services

SERVICE PROVIDER SURVEY RESULTS

managed SD-WAN services

Current trends, challenges and future plans for seizing the opportunity

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.

Scroll down to view the report highlights

monetization strategies

CSPs plan to leverage their managed SD-WAN services to drive new sustainable revenue from these top three streams:

Protect existing
connecivity
business

Expand customer
base and break
into new markets

Upsell additional
value-added
services and
solutions


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.



how many vendor solutions are CSPs using to support their managed SD-WAN services?

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.

standing out amongst the crowd

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.

indicated that offering customizable SD-WAN and security service bundles is their preferred differentiation approach


CSPs are looking to differentiate their managed SD-WAN service by enabling their customers to:


of CSPs rely on partnerships with security service providers to enable cloud-based or on-prem security solutions

enduring management and operations challenges

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


Top challenges in managing SD-WAN services

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

new mode for SD-WAN service operations

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.


have already implemented, are currently implementing or plan to implement a single, vendor-agnostic, service orchestration solution across multiple SD-WAN vendors solutions




CSPs realize that by employing standards-based, vendor-agnostic service modeling, alongside lifecycle management and orchestration, they can streamline SD-WAN service processing much faster; achieve operational efficiently and scalability; reduce operational costs; gain maximum agility to innovate and introduce new offerings faster; and meet the expectations of their business customers

Many CSPs differentiate by providing their customers with managed SD-WAN and underlay connectivity services.

claim that the operations complexity of managing their SD-WAN service over distributed infrastructure and multiple network and cloud domains impacts their ability to manage their services

Additional operational challenges include:


end-to-end hybrid service management and visibility is needed

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.

how can Amdocs help your managed and secured SD-WAN services succeed?


Amdocs’ Service and Network Automation solution (NEO) helps service providers successfully build and deliver their combined managed SD-WAN and security services. It does this by simplifying and accelerating the onboarding and integration of new vendors and partner solutions, new service offerings, service activation and fulfilment, and end-to-end service management and assurance.

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.

Learn more about Amdocs NEO