Virtualisation, digital services to take centre stage in 2016

Ari Banerjee, senior director, Strategy, NetCracker
Technology

In an industry as dynamic as communications, it can be hard to pin down exactly what will capture the attention of service providers and others in the space.

It’s clear that the top candidates have one thing in common though, says Ari Banerjee of NetCracker Technology  – they are all disruptive forces that will put pressure on traditional communications players to rethink their business models and ensure that their networks and supporting systems – including BSS and OSS – can support them.

These enablers of digital services will help traditional cable, wireless and fixed-line service providers finally turn the corner and become better able to compete against OTT players, content providers and other newer entrants that threaten to capture marketshare and make traditional providers almost irrelevant.

Here’s our take on the top trends for 2016 and how they will affect CSPs:

Virtualisation

Since software-defined networks (SDN) first captured the attention of network architects in 2007, network virtualisation has taken off like a rocket. For the past three years, network functions virtualisation (NFV) has gotten most of the hype, but both technologies together promise to deliver massive benefits – lower costs, faster time to market, new revenue streams – that any operator not already evaluating or deploying the technologies will need to step up and do so in 2016.

Until recently, NFV, and to a lesser extent, SDN, has been relegated to the lab, trial or proof of concept setting. But that’s quickly changing as CSPs get a firsthand look at what virtualisation can do for them and are ramping up efforts to deploy it in a commercial setting.

But to get to the operationalisation stage, operators need to ensure their BSS/OSS can handle this shift from the physical network to the virtual network and the accompanying agile and streamlined processes that follow. Complicating things further is the fact that most operators will have a hybrid environment for more than a decade as they slowly make changes to their network architectures.

Even with all of these changes – and the time, effort and money required to reach the virtualisation goal – operators will continue jumping on the bandwagon in the next year.

Business services

As communication service providers (CSPs) continue seeking alternative revenue streams, one customer segment they are trying to better serve is the business segment. Though business services segment is the most profitable segment it can also be a very demanding segment. Forward-thinking operators are marrying the capabilities of cloud and mobility to offer more enhanced service to this segment. As customers today want services 24X7 from anywhere, on any device, CSPs are becoming increasingly aware that cloud mobility will be essential in serving the changing demands of their Enterprise and SME/SMB customers.On top of their own operational issues, CSPs are also dealing with the demands of the business customers themselves. With the demand for the consumerisation of IT, CSPs are being asked to provide capabilities such as separate price plans for employees’ personal use and business use and to disable certain services when a user switches from business to personal mode. And, demand of such capabilities keep increasing as the appeal of BYOD is that of cost savings. Depending on their own BYOD policies, businesses may be thinking that they don’t even have to purchase or support their employees’ device, saving them money per employee. In many cases, a virtual network ecosystem will make it easier for CSPs to create, deliver and monetise business services. For example, CSPs may be interested in virtualising the network edge and customer premises in order to deliver a whole new breed of services to enterprise customers.

On top of their own operational issues, CSPs are also dealing with the demands of the business customers themselves. With the demand for the consumerisation of IT, CSPs are being asked to provide capabilities such as separate price plans for employees’ personal use and business use and to disable certain services when a user switches from business to personal mode. And, demand of such capabilities keep increasing as the appeal of BYOD is that of cost savings. Depending on their own BYOD policies, businesses may be thinking that they don’t even have to purchase or support their employees’ device, saving them money per employee. In many cases, a virtual network ecosystem will make it easier for CSPs to create, deliver and monetise business services. For example, CSPs may be interested in virtualising the network edge and customer premises in order to deliver a whole new breed of services to enterprise customers.

By relocating CPE functions into a data center, the device itself can become a standard, commoditised box that communicates with the network and delivers virtual services to customers. These can include firewall, routing, VPN, network address translation, intrusion detection and much more. Services are delivered as virtual network functions (VNFs), which run on virtual machines (VMs) on hardware and can be chained together to deliver advanced functionality. This architectural shift also allows operators to offer cloud-based services in a cloud broker model, including office productivity applications, security, data storage and more.

CSPs are definitely concentrating on the needs of the business customer as they would like to be able to offer services like enable threshold alerts, customer set spending and rich customer care options and loyalty plans. The challenge for operators is to be able to improve their business customer satisfaction by being able to have a single view of the customer. Despite these desires and others, CSPs find that complex activities such as resource optimisation, service qualification and design and discovery preventing them from having optimal service fulfillment and less than desirable fallout. In order to serve their business customers better CSPs need to streamline their siloed BSS and OSS systems and focus on BSS/OSS convergence and end to end service orchestration and service management capability.

The author is Ari Banerjee, senior director, Strategy, NetCracker Technology.

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