Artificial intelligence for IT or network operations, or AIOps, is an approach to managing complex IT operations that optimizes service availability and delivery, predicting and preventing problems before they occur. AIOps runs on multi-layered technology platforms that harness machine learning (ML), predictive analytics, and AI to automate, enhance, and improve business operations. At BMC, AIOps is integrated across our BMC Helix Operations Management solution. As a communication service provider (CSP), how can BMC AIOps benefit your daily operations? It comes down to:

1. Improved efficiency by automating event correlation, network monitoring, and performance analysis to eliminate manual toil.
2. Proactive incident resolution by analyzing vast amounts of real-time data across devices, applications, and network infrastructure to identify, predict, and detect root causes before these incidents can impact service delivery.
3. Faster incident response by diagnosing network and service anomalies. By integrating BMC HelixGPT generative AI, CSP IT and network operations teams can receive situation summaries, best action recommendations, and more.
4. Optimized resource utilization by providing insights into network traffic patterns, application performance, and infrastructure capacity management.

If you are a CSP, all of this sounds great. The difference is that BMC continues to advance observability, monitoring, and automated remediation. In fact, BMC has received two industry recognitions for its AIOps solution. First, BMC was honored with the Outstanding Catalyst Showcase Award at DTW 2023 for its pivotal role in revolutionizing CSP service assurance through AIOps. Second, BMC Helix was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Process-Centric AI for IT Operations (AIOps), Q2 2023.

Here are just a few capabilities BMC AIOps deliver to help CSPs realize the benefits I mentioned.

1. Service blueprints: BMC AIOps is the only solution on the market to offer CSPs and enterprises out-of-the-box service blueprints, which make creating and maintaining dynamic service models easier. With support for microservices, Kubernetes, cloud, and application performance monitoring (APM), these dynamic service models are automatically updated, ensuring accurate service models are used in today’s ever-changing IT environments.

2. Situation explainability powered by causal AI: This capability sets a new standard for incident resolution by correlating incidents with similar current and past occurrences to generate the best action to resolve the incident swiftly. User-driven feedback for situations provides greater contextual understanding and allows additional situation information to be added by a user for faster root cause isolation. This empowers CSPs and enterprises to recover from service outages and other potential risks more quickly—without manually scanning multiple incident logs. The BMC HelixGPT capability streamlines the process with concise, plain-language summaries of how issues were resolved. Probable root cause reports can be created and “remembered” for future use.

3. AIOps situation fingerprinting: Powered by advanced causal AI, situation fingerprinting automatically identifies whether a similar situation has previously occurred, eliminating the need to (re)diagnose it. This helps CSP network operations teams ease future identification to help speed mean time to repair (MTTR), reduce noise and staff toil, and improve service performance.

4. Improved deep container auto-detection: With the BMC Helix platform’s advanced discovery capabilities, all users can benefit from automated detection and an in-depth understanding of their containerized environments. This capability enhances knowledge-sharing among CSP network operations, site reliability engineers (SREs), services owners, and field teams responsible for modern, dynamic containerized environments. By enabling deeper container visibility, users will speed up MTTR while significantly reducing traditionally manual efforts. For CSPs, event and incident data and service prediction user interfaces (UIs) can analyze and predict service outages and remediate an issue before it escalates.

As we get closer to Mobile World Congress 2024, beginning February 26, BMC will share more exciting news for CSPs.

I welcome the opportunity to meet you in Barcelona in a few weeks.

Over the past few months, I have had the privilege of meeting with Telefonica, Vodafone, TalkTalk, and over 30 other leading communication service providers (CSPs) as they continue to converge network and IT operations management (ITOM). A critical topic of those conversations is how CSPs can leverage generative artificial intelligence (AI) to improve customer service and operational performance.

BMC is the first global vendor to embed generative AI across our entire service and operations management platform. You can read more about this ground-breaking announcement here.

Aside from that, we have been at the forefront of generative AI with BMC HelixGPT, a generative AI capability that can be tuned to the specific needs of CSPs. An immediate benefit for CSPs lies in empowering conversational use cases for network management and operations, driving actionable insights in natural language with a modular and adaptive generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) engine design. Utilizing large language models (LLMs), BMC HelixGPT captures and then learns from all data and insights to become an expert across all of your designated CSP data and systems for more accurate results and outcomes that are specific to your CSP.

We are collaborating with many CSPs on their generative AI journeys, advising how can help them achieve zero-touch, zero-trouble IT and network operations. Short-term use cases span network optimization, predictive network maintenance, customer experience transformation, and more. Here are few:

• Network optimization to identify performance patterns and anomalies and remediate incidents faster with clear situation summaries. You can see this in action through BMC Helix-GPT Powered Situation Summaries with Explainability.
• Predictive network maintenance that analyzes historical data and real-time information to determine potential points of network failure and then offers insights to resolve the issue. BMC HelixGPT-Powered Resolution Insights can save network engineers valuable time and resources.
• Customer experience transformation that improves contextual virtual agent experiences to improve responses with more natural and human-like conversations. You can see how through our BMC HelixGPT-Powered Conversational Search and Engagement

BMC’s leadership in generative AI is just one of the many ways we deliver positive business outcomes for CSPs. As we get closer to Mobile World Congress 2024, which will start on February 26, I will share more of the exciting CSP solution advancements from BMC.

Please stay tuned.

With many global communications markets saturated, one of the most important ways operators can grow their business is by convincing customers to switch from a competitor. That means delivering a better customer experience—or, conversely, avoiding the kind of poor experience that forces subscribers to seek an alternative. This intensified focus on quality is revealing critical liabilities in traditional communication service provider (CSP) operations defined by siloed data, tools, and practices. Transformation has become essential to deliver greater customer satisfaction, more efficiently, as part of the wider journey towards a zero touch, zero trouble future.

As they seek to modernize the way they run their networks and their business, operators are looking to the example of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Meta, and Microsoft Azure—companies that work at a similar scale to CSPs, but with far greater levels of speed, agility, and profitability. Telco clouds can help them reengineer their infrastructure for today’s requirements, but they’re only part of the answer. To remove the operational friction that can undermine service assurance, degrade efficiency, and slow innovation, CSPs must also break down silos and unify workflows across their increasingly converged IT and network domains.

Legacy silos undermine quality and slow innovation

The rapid evolution of communications markets has dramatically reshaped customer expectations. Just a few years ago, subscribers were willing to accept multiple provider touchpoints for different services. Instead of getting unified notifications or having a single point of contact for problems with products, services, and accounts, they understood that any given issue might take a few tries through different channels to resolve. This reflected the reality on the operator’s side, in which an IT environment delivered processes like billing and customer service management, and a separate network environment focused on actual service delivery.

Today, these separate domains generally remain the norm—at least in operational terms. IT and network operations (ITOps and NetOps) teams have their own separate workflow systems. The technologies used across these domains are often duplicative—two sets of tools to pay for and support and two sets of data—customized to meet specific, often legacy objectives. Integrations between the two domains are complex and brittle, if they exist at all.

Designed for a slower-moving era with more modest customer expectations, this fragmented environment makes network service management frustratingly inefficient for both customers and staff. If a customer has an issue with a network-enabled service or application, the request comes in through the IT system, waits to be passed over to a network team for resolution, and then waits to be pushed back to the IT system to update the customer.

But while the siloed nature of network and IT technologies has been slow to change, customer expectations have shifted more quickly. While customer and user interactions with CSPs are slow, unreliable, opaque, and fragmented, other technology companies offer far more seamless and satisfying experiences. This disparity makes it impossible for operators to project a fully modern brand image for the digital era.

Within CSPs, fragmentation slows innovation and business agility. Siloed IT and network data and processes are poorly suited to the new generation of converged delivery infrastructure, where virtualized networking runs on a commodity platform of hypervisors and containers. Cumbersome change management processes make service assurance a brake on the deployment of new services.

While some elements of IT and network will remain in separate domains—fixing a software error is an entirely different prospect than repairing failed hardware at a remote network site—there are vast areas of operations where a unified approach is both practical and increasingly essential. To meet the demands of today’s customers and the competitive imperatives of modern communications, CSPs need to drive convergence to the furthest extent possible.

Network service management for an autonomous future

As part of a wider journey toward a zero touch, zero trouble future, many operators are already looking to break down operational and process silos with a unified workflow platform across increasingly converged IT and network domains. After all, when you’re delivering virtualized network services (VNS) and converged network services (CNS) over containerized and virtual machine (VM)-based hybrid cloud infrastructures, many or most issues will involve technologies, data, and personnel across both domains.

Bridging the two through common data, tools, visibility, and services can enable ITOps and NetOps teams to collaborate more efficiently and deliver greater customer satisfaction. Specific capabilities can be tailored to meet the needs of various IT and network technical consumers, but teams will no longer need to waste time with manual information-sharing workarounds like email.

Traditionally, networks have been managed by technologies, with highly specialized teams dedicated to individual areas such as transport, access, mobility, orchestration, and so on. As networking becomes increasingly software-defined, this model is beginning to be replaced with teams organized around products, each spanning multiple constituent technologies. These small, agile teams follow more of a DevOps model, working together to solve issues and create solutions in minutes, not weeks.

Here, too, replacing separate IT and network management workflows with a unified platform saves cost while supporting new ways of working more efficiently, with everyone sharing common data and gaining visibility into the converged environment. New digital and network products can be brought to market quicker, and personnel can spend less time supporting the platform to devote their attention to transformation.

As CSPs move toward more autonomous networks, converged data and workflows enable the replacement of many types of manual toil by both task automation and higher-level artificial intelligence (AI)-powered functions. Operators can use AI innovation to address key challenges around change and incident management, common cause detection, and proactive service management, using data to prevent many problems from arising in the first place, and solving them more quickly and effectively when they do occur. Eliminating repetitive fixes while increasing productivity, operators can reduce cost-to-serve, accelerate mean time to resolution (MTTR), and improve customer satisfaction—with the kinds of experiences that retain existing customers while attracting new ones.

Building unified discovery and AIOps into network service management

The increasing convergence of IT and network technologies demands a greater understanding of the dependencies between the virtualized network and the underlying hybrid cloud platform on which it runs. That makes unified observability a crucial requirement to ensure optimal service for the new breed of network-enabled applications. The vision for converged discovery across converged infrastructure is explored in our earlier blog, “Modern CSPs Need Unified Visibility Across Hybrid Cloud.”

Meanwhile, both zero touch and zero trouble networking require AIOps to reduce noise, improve prediction, find the root causes of service disruptions, and remediate problems automatically. In our next blog, we’ll discuss the essential role of AIOps in the new generation of CSP network and technology operations.

To learn more, read the first two blogs in this series, Modern CSPs Need Unified Visibility Across Hybrid Cloud and Zero Touch, Zero Trouble Starts with AIOps-Enabled Service Assurance

Then visit https://www.bmc.com/blogs/bmc-helix-receives-catalyst-showcase-award/ to find out about how BMC recently won a TM Forum catalyst award

Organizations across industries are continuously looking for ways to be better corporate citizens by adopting initiatives and making practicable changes to operate as responsible, “greener” business. In that spirit, communication service providers (CSPs) have an extraordinary opportunity to build a better business model for sustainability and their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies through hardware choices, smart technologies, accountability, and amplifying the circular economy.

Responsible hardware choices

By their very nature, CSPs operate on extraordinarily large volumes of data and network traffic, and historically, that’s been sustained by physical data centers. Those data centers then require utilities such as lighting, heating, and cooling—which contribute to the ongoing problem of carbon emissions. To achieve net-zero carbon emissions, or carbon neutrality, data centers must operate more sustainably, get smaller, or even disappear.

For organizations that must maintain physical data centers as part of their infrastructure, bringing those locations up to sustainable ventilation, heating, cooling, and lighting protocols like those established by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) can make a significant impact.

Smart technologies

Migrating data center assets to the cloud, and shifting network traffic from a central hub to the edge can also make a big difference by bringing them closer to customers, who are themselves often on the move. Moving to the edge also reduces latency and the corresponding energy and bandwidth requirements of retaining data centrally and moving it across greater distances. It also gets customers connected faster, so it’s a win-win. Implementing Green Internet of Things (IoT) devices that reduce the power and energy usage—and emissions—of edge devices such as radio antennas can also help.

According to Networks on Cloud: A Clear Advantage, a recently released Capgemini Research Institute study, the cloud is on the rise for CSPs, and nearly half of telco network capacity will be cloud-native in the next three to five years—growing from a 31 percent global average in 2022 to 46 percent by 2027.

The survey estimates that network assets account for 42 percent of telcos’ greenhouse gas emissions, and says that respondents hope to reduce that by five percent through cloud adoption. Additional benefits of cloud include “reduced physical hardware footprint, reduced power usage, auto-scaling of network on demand, and managing power consumption of mobile towers by using [artificial intelligence (AI)] and machine learning.”

AI can also help CSPs improve operational efficiency with predictive analytics that support resource and network planning and allocation according to variables such as customer behaviors, trends, and climate events, and optimize the supply chain from the routes taken to the modes of transportation, while more advanced tools can ramp energy usage up and down as needed.

A Nokia GSMA Intelligence survey of global mobile service providers found that 78 percent of respondents see AI as very or extremely effective at delivering energy-efficiency improvements such as reducing the carbon footprint of their networks, processing their data efficiently, and translating it into actionable insights. Sixty-five percent believe the technology could shrink their energy consumption by ten percent or more. Most interestingly, half of those surveyed said their customers are the reason they’re looking for more energy-efficient network strategies.

Accountability

As more of those customers make sustainability a criteria for doing business, CSPs can publicly affirm their commitments by joining initiatives that hold businesses accountable. The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) partnership’s Business Ambition for 1.5° C campaign is a collective of businesses committed to reaching the namesake target goal of reducing the earth’s temperature by 1.5° C and achieving a zero-carbon economy. SBTi recognizes that the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector faces ongoing challenges as its industry grows and has set forth guidelines to help it attain more sustainable practices.

A similar initiative was launched in 2021 in the EU. The European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC), supported by the European Commission and the European Parliament at the request of the EU Council, aims to maximize the sustainability benefits of digitalization within the ICT sector, while supporting sustainability goals of other sectors outside the industry. The criteria for participation are here.

Circular economy

Another way CSPs can move the needle on sustainability is by ensuring ethical and responsible disposal of their hardware as they move to cloud and hybrid environments. While promoting new devices and device refreshes to consumers is part of the business model, CSPs can educate those same customers about the circular economy and promote those practices by designing sustainable packaging and encouraging—and incentivizing—customers to recycle or donate their devices when they reach end of life. This will help keep them and their harmful components out of landfills and waterways.

CSPs have an incredible opportunity to make an impact and scale the smart circular economy through an eco-centered supply chain, ethical IT asset disposal, Green IoT, and edge and AI strategies. Together, these key technological enablers can help ensure a sustainable digital transition within the telecommunication industry and beyond. To learn how BMC is helping transform telecommunications for the CSPs of tomorrow, visit bmc.com/CSP.

In a mature marketplace, communications service providers (CSPs) are under constant pressure to retain existing consumer and business customers, attract defectors from the competition and drive new use cases with innovative IOT/5G and edge service. After all, there are only so many existing customers to go around—and if you can’t meet the needs of your current subscribers, they’ll be quick to go elsewhere. That makes it critical to take a data-driven approach to your business.

Telecommunications networks and business systems hold vast information about customers and connected devices; service consumption, app utilization and performance, payments, requirements, and preferences—virtually every aspect of their relationship with your business. All you need to do is find accurate, efficient ways to put it to work on their behalf while lowering costs.

Does that sound more easily said than done? In the past, CSPs have struggled to make optimal use of operations support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) data to drive business value. Outdated systems have made it difficult to execute the data workflows needed to respond to customer requests. Increasingly complex service packages have led to billing breakdowns that annoy and alienate subscribers. As new innovations and business opportunities appear on the horizon, business leaders are unable to capture actionable insights to create the right services at the right prices to delight current customers and win new ones. And throughout the organization, data friction undermines optimization efforts, leaving cost and inefficiency at unacceptable levels.

But that picture is changing fast. Today’s CSPs are finding new ways to get the right data to the right people and places at the right time—and discovering new opportunities to build customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. Consider a few common CSP data use cases.

Data pipeline management—With mobile markets nearing 100 percent penetration in many countries, CSPs need to offer the most appropriate and timely services to retain existing customers and attract new ones. There’s a truly vast amount of data available to guide these business decisions, including social media data, machine-generated communications, and transactional activity, but how can you exploit this asset? It’s not enough to simply capture data; you’ve also got to be able to extract actionable insights to drive customer loyalty, increase operational efficiency, develop new business models, and provide revenue protection.

Data and workflow orchestration play a central role in the creation and management of modern data pipelines across virtually every industry, and telecommunications is no different. CSPs are increasingly building automated, end-to-end data workflows that can be managed simply as business services. DevOps and DataOps teams can code data workflows directly into business applications, while business users can monitor and manage their own workflows to keep data flowing smoothly from diverse sources into consolidated systems to deliver business insights, leverage AI/ML for optimization, and unlock the full power of big data for competitive advantage.

Rating and billing—In complex BSS environments that have evolved incrementally over time, CSPs face significant challenges moving and processing call detail records (CDRs) across different systems for mediation, rating/billing, and invoicing while maintaining data integrity, accuracy, and auditability.

Legacy file transfer tools make it difficult to ensure that all the CDRs generated by network switches are correctly received and processed by downstream systems, which can increase the risk of billing problems.

Leading CSPs are now solving this problem by integrating, automating, and orchestrating CDR movements in end-to-end workflows, alongside related processes such as batch billing, ad-hoc rating, and scheduled or on-demand invoicing, across the entire system. With centralized visibility into workflow progress, CSPs can catch and correct delays or errors before they affect customers while also simplifying auditing and compliance. The historical data captured can yield immense value in a broad range of areas from system optimization and capacity planning to data-driven customer profiling and targeted promotions.

Porting authorization code (PAC)—CSPs receive millions of mobile number portability (MNP) requests every month from subscribers who want to change their service provider without changing their mobile number. Regulatory mandates call for these requests to be fulfilled within demanding service level agreements (SLAs)—often just a few hours. Traditional methods like scripting and service requests are too slow and error-prone to reliably hit the target, exposing the CSP to punitive compliance fines and disgruntled customers.

Data and application workflow orchestration offers a better solution. With a single view to define, schedule, manage, and monitor porting service application workflows; identify and remediate issues when they occur; and proactively predict and manage possible SLA violations, CSPs can meet the demanding requirements of both regulators and customers every time.

How BMC is driving data innovation

Long a mainstay of technology operations for CSPs, BMC is now helping service providers solve a new generation of data challenges. The BMC Helix Control-M data and application workflow orchestration solution makes it possible to automate the processes that connect existing data sources and systems and deliver the timely, accurate data needed for reporting, insights, and optimization. Automated workflow management and data integration replace manual scripting to speed the implementation of big data projects and deliver timely insights enabling successful business decisions. End-to-end visibility into data pipelines at every stage helps CSPs meet SLAs and resolve critical issues before deadlines are missed.

Telefónica Tech, Telefónica’s digital business unit, is now integrating its blockchain-powered TrustOS module with BMC Helix Control-M to enable end-to-end traceability, immutability, and time verification for files across key business workflows. By connecting existing IT solutions to blockchain capabilities, the solution spares CSPs the time and resources required to manually train employees on how to use blockchain. You can learn more about the Telefónica Tech integration here.

BMC – Enabling the CSP of tomorrow, today

For communications service providers (CSPs), the pressure is on. As new experiences, consumer preferences, and competitive pressures transform the landscape, companies throughout the industry are moving fast to establish leadership in a new era of digital innovation. To drive growth and retain customers, they must introduce new products faster, maintain higher quality across their service portfolio, and make better use of data to drive business decisions—all while mitigating risk and lowering operating cost. Simply put, they must elevate their network operations to new levels of excellence.

For over a decade, Vodafone and other leading CSPs around the world have relied on BMC Software solutions to transform and advance their IT services and operations capabilities. Now, the same technologies and practices can deliver a similar impact for network operations—and help CSPs secure their position in the industry vanguard. In this blog, we’ll discuss the drivers for this change and the results it has delivered for Vodafone.

Watch the video interview now

Driving growth in a customer-centric society

Competitive differentiation for CSPs in today’s customer-centric market depends on two interrelated factors: innovating with new digital services, and delivering an outstanding customer experience. As trends like multi-access edge computing (MEC), 5G slicing, IoT, and mobile private networks (MPN) redefine the landscape, exciting new possibilities are emerging for both consumer and enterprise offerings. Creating new product offerings is only the beginning; to build customer loyalty, protect their business, and drive long-term growth, operators need to keep subscribers so satisfied with their services and customer experience that they’d never think of looking elsewhere.

Capitalizing on this new wave of innovation isn’t just an opportunity for CSPs—it’s a necessity. Having made massive investments in 5G and MEC, and in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, operators need to ensure that these expenditures will translate into long-term profitability. The digital economy will be shaped by the leading gigabit networks—those with connectivity & digital solutions delivered by customer centric, AI-powered systems.

Delivering scale, productivity, and agility for a market in transformation

As operators move quickly to meet changing market demand, they often run into the constraints of traditional delivery models, platforms, and management methods. The network infrastructure in place has typically grown incrementally over time into a patchwork of separate delivery platforms for different types of services. Therefore, network operations teams struggle with legacy infrastructure, non-standard tooling and processes, limited automation, and a lack of visibility across this complex environment. As a result, they spend too much time and effort on even routine tasks, and fall back on reactive service assurance and management rather than working proactively to ensure the best possible customer experience.

CSPs already use BMC Software solutions to help IT operations and service management teams improve quality, resiliency, and agility within the systems that support their enterprise. The same technologies can now help operators modernise their network environment operations to meet a new generation of challenges.

Enabling efficiency with zero-touch operations

The most effective way to simplify and accelerate operations is to automate as much as possible. By minimizing human interaction during the deployment, operation, and remediation of network services, CSPs can complete these tasks more quickly and consistently while freeing valuable human talent for higher-level work. This includes evolving service assurance to detect and resolve faults automatically to minimize disruption to customer services—and even proactively identify performance degradation or network malfunction before they create problems and generate alarms. Ultimately, network operations will move to a closed-loop, lights-out model where service assurance activities are driven entirely by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).

Automating outcomes

As CSPs extend the role of automation across network operations, it’s important to understand its purpose—not simply to define a set of conditions and actions, but to achieve a specific goal for the business. By taking an intent-driven approach to automation, operators can start with the desired outcome—for example, maintain service at quality X—and let AI/ML determine the best way to achieve this outcome. To capture and harness the data needed to build this capability, CSPs can leverage the data within their existing IT service and operations management platforms, realizing even greater value from these investments.

Gaining flexibility with cloud-native networks

The widescale adoption of cloud-native technologies and cloud platforms has enabled a new era of more open, software-defined, and autonomous networking. Trends like software-defined networking (SDN), cloud network functions (CNF), and ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) make it possible to orchestrate and deliver network functionality faster, at a lower cost, with greater resiliency. In this way, operators can respond more quickly to specific customer requests, helping strengthen their satisfaction and loyalty while removing the temptation to consider competing products.

Helping Vodafone drive transformation

Scott Petty, Chief Digital and IT Officer at Vodafone, has seen firsthand the difference BMC Software can make in the Digital Transformation required when building the CSP of tomorrow, as recounted in a recent video interview; “BMC has been a great partner for us,” he says. “BMC plays a critical role in the ITSM world, arguably our most important application in operations, and can help bring along the rest of the industry in that standardization.”

Petty calls out several key outcomes BMC Helix solutions have delivered for Vodafone. As a key element of the operator’s strategy, Vodafone uses BMC Helix to free its network operations team from routine tasks like opening and closing incidents and allow them to focus on automation to enable zero-touch operations. “A great example is our service failure prediction services that were built with BMC, taking all of the data that we have from our ITSM platforms, understanding what’s happening in our technology environment, and starting to predict incidents before they happen,” he says. “We’ve been able to predict significant incidents two hours ahead of when the incident actually occurred. We’re now automating the discovery of the root cause and avoiding that incident by automating the processes to fix the issues that were starting to emerge in our estate.”

Working with BMC, Vodafone is already realizing its vision as the CSP of tomorrow. “We’re able to create great new revenue growth opportunities and service our existing customers to improve our net promoter score and hopefully generate more revenue,” says Petty.