Network automation: Key to differentiation and profitability

The goal is clear – increase process speed, reliability, and control so you can provide better customer service, increase productivity, and capitalize on new revenue opportunities. To achieve this goal, service providers need to streamline their key business processes that drive value for customers. They need to optimize, automate, and transform these processes to a more service-centric approach in order to separate the organization from the competition.

Structuring network management around the delivery of services requires automating change across all service components. To be effective, automation must break free of traditional tribes and silos to address all network infrastructure elements, teams and operations support systems.

Put another way, adopting a service-centric focus is how service providers achieve control over costs, complexity and compliance – and address their current lack of flexibility, responsiveness and innovation. Automation is the engine that powers the service-centric network operations organization.

Automated service delivery for optical networks is a comprehensive approach to unifying and standardizing the work of network operations. It creates a common, network-wide, end-to-end view of each optical service. It connects provisioning and maintenance processes and coordinates teams via common workflows. And it integrates with monitoring and ticketing tools to form a complete, integrated service management solution.

To be effective, an automation strategy must deliver on five key objectives. Automated service delivery accomplishes all five of the following:

• Deep visibility
  Structured and organized service views for immediate status overview and quick access to service descriptors
• Automation
  Simplified service creation and maintenance processes via computer-aided provisioning and the introduction of service templates
• Data and process integration
  Fully integrated process for automating management in all network infrastructure tiers and a generic interface to operations support systems
• Reporting
  Comprehensive service-assurance function for monitoring end-to-end performance and the availability of optical services
• Full life cycle support
  Spanning the full lifecycle of optical service management – provisioning, change, performance and availability management

Implementing automated service delivery helps transform the network operations organization from a capability-centric cost center to a service-centric line of business which is fully aligned with service provider goals and objectives. In the process, automated service delivery addresses service provider’s three biggest areas of concern: cost, complexity and scalability.

Follow this link to read more on network automation: Automated Service Delivery for Dynamic Optical Networks.