Solutions
Network Solutions and Services
Reimagining 5G and network solutions for future businesses
Highlights
- Telcos are looking to automate networks and services management for better performance and rapid innovation. A well-documented and up-to-date inventory system will serve as the key foundational element to support this vision. It will allow telcos to reengineer their processes to drive operational efficiencies and business innovation.
- Networks are going through a paradigm shift with respect to technology. Softwarization, virtualization, and generalization together are making telecom networks far more dynamic these days, marking a departure from what was traditionally driven by static, physical, and proprietary vendor elements.
- Telcos must harness their static, siloed, and inaccurate inventories and re-engineer them into dynamic and federated systems to align with changing network dynamics and evolving business needs.
- A dynamic federated inventory (DFI) can help companies effectively manage new-age complex and hybrid networks, make the most of their existing technology investments, and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
On this page
Why telcos need to rethink their inventory systems
Traditional inventory systems have long been one of the foundational elements for telcos.
They serve as a single source of truth for the smooth execution of a telco’s day-to-day business, while also supporting multiple business processes.
The static nature of these inventory systems and challenges in managing complex hybrid networks and siloed data views have led to a multifold increase in the challenges faced by telcos in their daily operations. This has adversely impacted multiple business processes relying on the inventory data, leading to unfavorable business outcomes such as poor service qualification, high mean time to repair, low first time right, increasing order fallouts, and eventual customer dissatisfaction as well as churn.
Traditional inventory systems require a lot of manual interventions to maintain information accuracy and reliability, resulting in higher chances of error and delays in business outcomes. Therefore, telcos must re-engineer their existing inventory stores, while investing in new inventory systems to streamline their business processes and support automation. This will lay the foundation for the modernization of operations support systems (OSS).
Traditional inventory systems must evolve to deliver accurate and reliable data stemming from:
- Increasingly dynamic and virtualized networks.
- Prevalence of hybrid networks encompassing physical, logical, and virtual.
- Seamless adoption of new technologies and service types (non-terrestrial networks).
- Exploding asset variety (5G devices, IoT devices, wearables).
- Increasingly dynamic and complex customer networks and topologies.
- Integrated, accurate, and expansive end-to-end view of networks and services.
Now, what telcos need to do is to incorporate advanced capabilities into their inventory space, such as:
- Real-time auto discovery and reconciliation to address on-ground data integrity challenges and alignment with a real-time network state
- Standardization and extension of inventory systems so they can quickly adapt to varying data models and device types in the market
- Intuitive visualization techniques capable of relating structured and unstructured data points across the telco ecosystem
These adaptations will increase data accuracy and integrity, helping telecom operators break away from manual processes and move toward increasing automation and autonomy in network and services management.
A dynamic and federated data view is crucial
Telcos face tremendous challenges in maintaining the real-time state of their networks and services and avoid full-scale transformation due to the time and cost involved in merging and creating a unified source of truth.
They manage and maintain different types of inventory information based on their business models. Lack of real-time auto-discovery functions, differing frequency of changes across the network layers and services, susceptibility to costly discovery tools, and unreliable reports generated with traditional discovery mechanisms complicate inventory data management.
The level of dynamism in an inventory object is defined by multiple factors such as the frequency of change, the change aspect of the element under consideration, the physical capacity limiting the change, security and regulatory constraints, and commercials aspects. Telcos need to have a dynamic, optimal, and real-time discovery mechanism capturing the split-second changes in networks to address all of these while avoiding network overload.
Mergers and acquisitions, organizational dynamics, end of service life (EOSL) tools, and migration complexities have resulted in telcos adopting multiple inventory solutions over time. Sunsetting network technologies such as copper-based networks does not incentivize companies to invest heavily in inventory consolidation programs. Hence, inventory data federation has become a pressing need for telcos to bring together information siloes and address data visibility and data quality challenges—all of which hamper business operations and growth.
With inventory data federation, telcos can collect relevant and accurate information from across varied data sources in the organization, while keeping the underlying information source intact. It creates an end-to-end data view layer and a common user interface to support business processes and users, while saving inventory consolidation costs.
However, federated data views from new and legacy data sources are not easy to build. Some of the challenges are:
- Data siloes across the organization
- Complex data relationships
- Data accuracy and integrity challenges
- Information depth and breadth in federated view
- Security and regulatory needs
- Standardization needs across disparate data sources
- Legacy technology challenges of data sources
Federation can be achieved using different techniques depending on the complexity of the underlying data sources, latency requirements, and the level of information required in the federated layer. Telcos must combine these techniques with intuitive topology models that will create the required data relationship view between federated elements.
A dynamic federated inventory for a centralized, virtual data store
A dynamic federated inventory (DFI) collects and provides real-time views of available and used network resources, services, and configurations.
This includes the historical network state, across multiple domains, vendors, and hybrid networks. It merges data in real time by collecting and federating it from various underlying sources, creating an end-to-end view the interplay between resources and services, occasionally including operational and contextual data.
We envision a DFI as characterized by eight key traits, which are – intelligent automation enabler, network and service aware, federated and standardized, real-time and historical state management, performant and scalable, flexible and extensible, distributed and cloud native, and AI native (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Key Features of Dynamic Federal Inventory
Figure 1
Key industry bodies including the Tele Management Forum (TM Forum), Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) – a mobile broadband standard, Multipurpose Empanelment Form (MEF), and the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) have been involved in defining the different aspects of DFI in terms of capabilities, qualities, data models, and integration standards.
Our approach to DFI combines and elevates the best practices and suggestions from these standard bodies and delivers on the business refresh enabled by technology refresh. It enables graph-based visualization and event-driven architecture for telcos to meet their data residency and persistence requirements and deployment and security considerations. This way, telcos are able to leverage their existing investments while creating the foundation for the management of next- generation intelligent networks.
DFI ensures timely value realization
A dynamic federated inventory helps telcos introduce new network technologies, business lines, and services into their landscape with relative ease.
It also helps them restructure their processes and business models to cater to the network of the future, characterized by virtual, dynamic, and automated capabilities driven by data.
With DFI, telcos can reduce their management and operational challenges. It will prepare them to cope with disruptive technological advancements and reimagine existing business models. Telcos must adopt DFI systems to stay ahead and meet changing customer expectations in an agile manner.
