The main hurdle for service providers seeking to make the transformation to experience providers is unwieldy automation. This leads to prohibitively slow and costly service rollouts.
Because higher-value, higher-revenue services are more difficult to design and deploy (see Figure 1), many service providers have focused on simply delivering high-speed internet. This leaves little competitive differentiation other than “speeds and feeds.” The result can be a race to the bottom for network operators while cloud-based hyperscalers garner lucrative Over-the-Top (OTT) service revenue streams.
Barriers to service provider transformation
Streamlining service deployment takes “the right automation”
To gain competitive leverage, service providers need to move beyond optimizing existing services to creating new ventures. Higher-revenue services are generally targeted to very specific customer needs and vertical market niches. Examples include an internet café that needs high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity, or a power user who wants a gaming service at home. Other possibilities include special connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) use cases such as power/water meters for utilities, augmented reality for education, or telemedicine for hospitals.
From 5G slice deployment to enterprise broadband service delivery, service providers need to rapidly design and onboard new services assembled from best-of-breed, multi-vendor components. Further, these services should be reusable across clouds, network elements and locations. In short, delivering new services at the pace of hyperscalers means emulating their ability to automate all aspects of the process, from onboarding new network elements to designing new services, to activating services for current and new subscribers.
Reducing reliance on custom code
Unfortunately, many service providers today rely on custom code to support new service design and delivery. Automation is generally approached on a per use case basis without factoring in reusability across use cases. This is a poor automation tactic because it inherently demands high effort and high cost to develop and maintain and is highly resistant to change. Time to revenue is also high because of all the time and specialized work involved.
Transforming to an experience provider business model starts with an orchestration and automation solution with the following characteristics:
· Is vendor neutral and supports all suppliers’ network elements and applications
· Simplifies service design, integration and deployment
· Deploys the same design across multiple use cases, network infrastructures and/or clouds
With this kind of modular, reusable, vendor neutral and low-code automation in place, the time and cost to roll out new services goes way down – so much so, that innovators can afford to test and evolve new service ideas to capitalize on more revenue opportunities faster.
While some vendors talk about ease of deployment for services, that promise is often predicated on a lengthy, costly design/development process to code the automation, after which the process of deployment is indeed simpler. Meanwhile, service providers have to pay upfront for all this custom coding before realizing any revenue.
By cutting down the time it takes to design new services, and then making those new designs easy to deploy and manage, automation can help grow revenue without adding burdensome levels of difficulty and/or greater staffing needs.
Leveraging DZS Xtreme
DZS Xtreme simplifies the lifecycle automation for deployment of any network slice, service, and/or application across public, private, hybrid and edge clouds. By using no-/low-code practices and offering a vendor-agnostic single-pane of glass view into the network, DZS empowers service provider’s network operations teams to deliver unparalleled end-to-end network orchestration, automationand actionable insights for all connectivity services.
As a standards-based, open ecosystem supplier, DZS is committed to using standards-compliant APIs and plugin-based architectures to enable multi-domain orchestration and automation of any use case across heterogeneous technology infrastructure – broadband access, optical and mobile networks.
To find out more about how DZS can help service providers network operations teams to deliver smarter services faster, at scale and fully vendor-agnostic, contact DZS.