As consumers demand new and better services, communication service providers (CSPs) are under pressure to deliver more services without charging more. In response, network operators are moving to adopt software-defined, hybrid cloud infrastructures and autonomous networks as a way to increase agility at scale while still controlling cost. But while the vision is a sound one, its practical reality is pushing traditional network inventory and asset management approaches to the breaking point. To deliver the transformation their business demands, CSPs need to break down silos between network and cloud domains, remove operational friction, and use data effectively to make better decisions, faster.

Lines blur between network and cloud

Traditionally, telecommunications networks and IT infrastructure represented two different worlds. Even within the operational network, telcos often ended up with dedicated silos for fixed-line service, mobile, carrier, transport, and so on—each with its own domain-specific network inventory and topology tools. The IT applications and services delivered on top of the network required their own dedicated management technologies, as well. This fragmentation was far from ideal in terms of efficiency, but as long as operators relied on relatively static, monolithic environments, the challenges it posed remained manageable.

In today’s fast-moving markets, however, CSPs are turning to virtualization and cloud as a way to increase agility, resiliency, and redundancy while reducing cost. To escape the constraints of physical network infrastructures, they’re delivering virtualized network services (VNS) and converged network services (CNS) over Kubernetes and virtual machine (VM)-based hybrid cloud infrastructures. Hardware devices—from routers and switches to packet gateways, radio access network (RAN) controllers, and mobile network cores—are being replaced with software. Open-source cloud-native network functions (CNFs) and commodity telco clouds offer faster ways to add services and respond to changes in demand while managing resources more efficiently.

As a result of this shift to software, the traditional separation between network and IT is now blurring. For network operations teams, which brings endless new challenges. If a problem arises with a virtualized network function being delivered over VMWare or OpenStack on hybrid cloud, for example, the network team’s remediation efforts can be hampered by a lack of visibility and insight into the dynamic elements of this converged infrastructure. Without access to complete data across both IT and network domains, it’s difficult or impossible to understand the dependencies between the two—especially when services depend on assets in a Google, Azure, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Service assurance becomes slow, costly, and complex, putting customer experience at risk.

And reactive problem-solving is only part of the problem. Given customer expectations for flawless service at all times, CSPs need to proactively prevent issues in the first place, and to adapt quickly to demands that change by the minute. However, without the tools, data, and understanding they need to manage increasingly dynamic and elastic virtualized services, network operations teams struggle to be agile or effectively use automation. The challenge is compounded when operators acquire smaller companies, inheriting their technology environments, and do not have holistic insight, which further complicates an already arduous integration process. The rapid rise of cloud-native development also makes it too easy for business units to build and deploy their own applications without the knowledge of or visibility into network operations, incurring the security and compliance risks of shadow IT.

New rules around telecommunications cybersecurity, such as the U.K.’s Telecommunications (Security) Act (TSA) 2021, the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 in Australia, and similar U.S. legislation, are making these data silos and blind spots a matter of regulatory risk, as well. With assets spread across proliferating repositories located on-premises and in the cloud, CSPs face an urgent need for unified visibility to ensure compliance and protect their business from threats.

Converged infrastructure calls for converged discovery

As CSPs adopt network virtualization and a hybrid cloud infrastructure that includes telco clouds, they need to ensure full visibility, understanding, and data integration across both domains. In other words, they need a cloud-native, converged platform to discover the dynamic elements that make up their network, the underlying hybrid cloud infrastructures, and the dependencies among them. The idea isn’t to replace traditional network inventory tools—which will remain essential—but rather to augment them with new discovery capabilities tailored to the more agile, dynamic nature of environments transformed through cloud-native development and software-defined networking.

With this foundation of unified visibility and understanding, CSPs can evolve toward the unified service management of its IT and network technologies that is demanded by the dynamic and elastic nature of modern telco clouds. Both network service management platforms and AIOps platforms can be provided with complete data to enrich, automate, and contextualize workflows, predict faults more accurately, and remediate problems more quickly and efficiently. Dynamic application topologies, enriched with data ingested from application performance monitoring (APM) and other systems of management, can help network teams better predict the customer service impact of problems and changes and construct new service topologies more easily.

For customers, the impact of this unified approach can be dramatic. Network operations teams are better able to predict and prevent problems affecting service wherever they might occur, and when problems do arise, they can be diagnosed and repaired faster. For both network and IT teams, shared visibility and understanding removes friction and enables better collaboration. And for the business, converged asset discovery across hybrid cloud infrastructures helps improve security and regulatory compliance.

Toward zero-touch, zero-trouble networks

While converged discovery is an essential capability for the modern telco cloud, it’s only one element of a larger vision. The next step is for CSPs to put this single trusted source of asset data to work to enable both AIOps-powered service assurance and network service management. In the next two blogs in this series, we’ll explore each of these transformations and the benefits they enable for CSPs and their customers.

To learn more, read the first two blogs in this series, Zero Touch, Zero Trouble Starts with AIOps-Enabled Service Assurance and Demanding Markets Drive CSPs to Transform Network Service Management.

To learn more about our BMC Helix solutions for AIOps, visit https://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/observability-aiops.html

For over a decade, enterprises across industries, including communication service providers (CSPs), have viewed Internet of Things (IoT) technology as an integral component of their digital transformation, helping them unlock operational efficiencies, create new revenue streams, and collect large amounts of data from which to extract valuable and actionable information. It’s no surprise, then, that the IoT market has experienced exponential growth and shows no signs of slowing down. According to McKinsey & Co., by 2030, IoT could enable between $5.5 trillion and $12.6 trillion in value globally, up from approximately $310 billion in 2020.

Across the telecommunications space, IoT has been viewed as a way for CSPs to extract better returns from capital-intensive 5G infrastructures. In a new BMC white paper, Achieving Operational Agility for Communication Service Providers with a Unified IoT Platform in the 5G Age, we explore:

• How IoT services can enhance efficiency and generate revenue for 5G-enabled CSPs
• The business impact of IoT services on CSPs and the telecom industry
• Why network slicing and edge computing are so important for IoT
• The operational challenges of future IoT services
• Improving operational agility with IoT at the edge

The paper also discusses the benefits of BMC Helix IoT Edge for CSPs. The unified, comprehensive platform is uniquely designed to manage IoT and edge infrastructures by providing analytics and remediation capabilities that can help CSPs address performance issues, downtime, poor customer service, and asset inventory management—and deliver real-time business insights for continued innovation.

Specific to CSPs, BMC Helix IoT Edge can process large, complex 5G-generated data volumes with IoT use cases that increase business efficiency, and introduce newer business models that complement the value of 5G. And it can monitor telecom network workloads and applications operating at the edge and reduce the need to push data back to the core over a fixed bandwidth backhaul.

One way for CSPs to capitalize on IoT in the telecom industry is through tailored network offerings that connect the entire complex manufacturing ecosystem, from temperature sensors to flow meters, to ensure end-to-end supply-chain visibility, improve production efficiency, and drive cost savings. CSPs are also embarking on their own IoT journey, utilizing the power of acquired data to tap into crucial insights. For example, telcos can deploy intricate software platforms to connect diverse physical assets, leveraging their combined intelligence to strengthen decision-making and develop prediction models.

As telcos and CSPs seek to continually improve their services to enterprises and consumers, they must consider the complementary technology and solutions that will help them realize the promise of 5G and overcome the hurdles of collecting and managing diverse and large amount of data, coordinating platforms and scaling accordingly. Leading CSPs are already doing this by building on their core strengths—mature telecommunications infrastructure, impressive data sets, and 5G-enabled connectivity—to deliver new, value-added offerings.

To learn more about IoT and the edge for CSPs and BMC Helix IoT Edge, download the full white paper here.

As communications service providers (CSPs) transform their business by modernizing their services and expanding their offerings, they face an already highly saturated market and ever-shrinking margins. Competitive pressure is also increasing—from traditional companies investing heavily in capital-intensive innovations like 5G and fiber to the x (FTT) to grow their market share and revenue and non-traditional entrants, hyperscalers, and other digital-native businesses disrupting business with innovations like private 5G networks, edge computing, and network as a service (NaaS). All told, the changes are driving CSPs to review both business models and determine which compelling new services they need to succeed.

Modernizing service assurance

Current service systems—many of which have been highly customized and still rely on manual processes—cannot adapt to the fast-evolving, newer market demands and are straining to meet the scalability and performance required for success. Newer services also rely on a mesh approach, so IT service management (ITSM) must not only be proactive in resolving issues but also capable of performing seamless switchovers to avoid performance slowdowns and outages when issues do occur.

The shift toward adopting customer- and service-centric IT operations (ITOps) is hampered by the current technology-centric model and traditional service assurance solutions. The time for a modern service assurance solution is now. Introducing BMC Helix for CSP, an intelligent, CSP-specific solution that leverages the power of the BMC Helix Platform to drive automation and customer centricity across service assurance operations.

Phil Brooks, executive consultant and CEO at ANS Digital Transformation, led the team that collaborated with BMC to help design BMC Helix for CSP. “Automation and customer centricity remain a vision and ambition for all CSPs. BMC Helix for CSP is a giant step in achieving that vision,” he shares. “The evolution of network infrastructure to become more IP-based and the advent of network functions virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN), and cloud is driving convergence of network and IT operations. BMC customers can now leverage and consolidate all their service management solutions onto the single BMC Helix Platform to support these new operating models.”

BMC Helix for CSP

Industry-leading, real-world experience collated from multiple design partners, including ANS and major CSP organizations, ensures that BMC Helix for CSP captures the very best way of working, including business-critical flexibility, hyperscaling, performance, and security. The adoption of CSP industry standards for interoperability and service modeling is also key to supporting end-to-end process automation and providing critical real-time insights.

BMC Helix for CSP focuses on four areas:

• Service assurance
• Service quality management
• “Zero-touch” network operations management
• TM Forum certification

Service assurance is the group of processes and capabilities that allow a CSP to quickly identify and resolve network and performance issues before they impact customer services, and it’s moving toward a closed-loop, lights-out model. “Traditional service assurance approaches have been resource-focused, break-fix oriented operations with limited visibility [that prioritizes] interrupted customer services. This has changed dramatically in recent years with the increased criticality of network services and customer choice,” says Brooks. “The move from manual activities to artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-driven processes is still very much in its infancy but enabled through BMC Helix for CSP.”

With BMC Helix for CSP, you can monitor, optimize, and comprehensively operate your worldwide infrastructure seamlessly through a “zero-touch” network operations command center and single-pane-of-glass to support fully automated, closed-loop, and “headless” operations. “Zero touch is the ultimate goal of CSPs to support critical services and compete in a highly commoditized market,” adds Brooks. “Those that can achieve it will be the winners, beating the competition and fully monetizing their network infrastructure assets. BMC Helix for CSP provides the platform to achieve this goal.”

“The CSP transformation will be a journey. Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and quality of service (QoS) that monitor improvements to the customer experience are fundamental measurements of this journey. BMC Helix for CSP is equipped to provide key analytical data to support this analysis [through interactive dashboards and service analytics that deliver valuable insights].”

According to Brooks, API certifications within BMC Helix for CSP enable the essential ecosystem integrations required for CSP market success. “Data and interoperability are at the core of the BMC Helix for CSP design philosophy,” he explains. “This has been enabled through the adoption of TM Forum industry standards to support end-to-end service assurance process automation and provide actionable insights.”

Conclusion

Optimized for complex and ever-changing worldwide network infrastructure challenges, BMC Helix for CSP provides the comprehensive, critical intelligent service assurance capabilities that CSPs require to deliver the differentiated services vital to their customers and their business. Learn more at bmc.com/csp.

5G is expected to create significant new business opportunities for communications service providers (CSPs). The demand for broadband mobile data services that significantly increased during the pandemic has accelerated 5G deployments. As a result, 5G has become the fastest-adopted mobile generation. In fact, according to Telecoms.com, by the end of 2021, more than 150 CSPs in over 60 countries had already launched commercial 5G services (TechTarget).

However, ultra-fast mobile data access is just one facet of the “5G game.” 5G has also been designed as a single platform to create significant new revenue streams for CSPs from a variety of non-communication services such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine communication (mMTC)—all enabled by 5G network slicing.

The real revolution brought about by 5G (5G standalone) and related Open radio-access network (O-RAN) standards is a cloudified core and radio access network architecture that is separating the network from its physical infrastructure. As a result, future telco networks will look more and more like contemporary IT infrastructure.

They will be software-defined and composed of standardized virtual network functions that can be flexibly deployed on distributed private, hybrid, or public cloud platforms—and they’ll run on standard IT infrastructure, rather than traditional vendor-specific, proprietary hardware “boxes.”

A similar cloudification process has been ongoing for nearly a decade in the domain of telco IT. It started with the virtualization of CSPs’ datacenters, followed by the launch of private clouds. Several European, Middle Eastern, and Africa (EMEA) CSPs have already started refactoring some of their operations support and business support systems (OSS/BSS) “application silos” by migrating them to cloud-native architectures while introducing DevOps culture into their organizations.

Echoing this, traditional OSS/BSS vendors (including BMC) are also containerizing their previously monolithic applications to enable flexible deployments in private, hybrid, and public clouds. Containerized architecture will likely become one of key procurements requirements for newly deployed OSS/BSS solutions.

Due to this virtualization and cloudification, telco IT and network infrastructures will finally converge, resulting in much higher flexibility; reduced costs; improved organizational agility; and continuous service innovation. However, this process will also create new operational challenges as CSPs will have to concurrently manage and orchestrate the virtualized functions that “float” over the elastic cloud infrastructure and co-exist with the legacy infrastructure for many years to come.

For these reasons, leading CSPs are now looking for future-proof “converged” OSS solutions that will allow them to effectively and efficiently manage and operate existing IT and networks and the emerging cloudified future mesh infrastructure. Intelligent automation powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) has transitioned from a “hot topic” of conversation to a business-critical requirement for CSPs.

Manual processes and traditional service assurance systems are insufficient to keep up with the speed, volume, and complexity of current CSPs, and they are not well-suited for cloudified networks, either. This makes it imperative for CSPs to completely reinvent how they approach all aspects of their services.

BMC Helix for CSP

To respond to these new requirements, BMC has launched BMC Helix for CSP, a specialized, purpose-built, TM Forum-certified intelligent service assurance solution to help modern CSPs and telcos deliver competitive and differentiated services for their highly competitive market. Now, CSPs can use one flexible and modular solution for both service assurance and service management across IT and network domains. Integrated orchestration and automation features allow CSPs to streamline their operations and drive process efficiencies, reduce costs, and speed issue resolutions.

Additional features include:

• Intelligent service assurance: Easily scale to manage millions of cases with leading self-service and service desk solutions.
• Trouble ticketing: Efficiently identify, investigate, track, and remediate network issues.
• Work order management: Streamline management of remedial activities through automation.
• Network operations automation: Automate the creation, enrichment, assessment, and assignment of network issues and operations for network operations centers (NOCs).
• Dynamic service modeling: Experience 360-degree visibility of network services, resources, and interdependencies, including physical and logical network topology.
• Service quality insights: Use interactive dashboards and service analytics for service level agreement (SLA) tracking, performance levels, and more.
• TM Forum compliant integration: Get extensive API certifications for essential ecosystem integrations from a solution based on TM Forum information framework (SID) and business process framework (eTOM) modeling standards.

To learn more about BMC Helix for CSP, visit bmc.com/csp.