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.
