The service assurance gap: why ‘make do and mend’ fails modern networks

The ongoing transformation of modern telecoms networks and architecture is not a monolithic process.

As operators embrace the cloudification of networks, there are many moving parts — with internal teams, technologies, and opportunities travelling at different speeds.

Earlier this year, TM Forum declared that the operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) journey to the cloud had reached a tipping point, with consensus on the need for change and early movers already reaping rewards. However, while direction of travel may be consistent, strains can show as gaps open up, and these are exacerbated when operator ambitions for new network capabilities diverge from the direction of their legacy systems and vendors.

An area testing the limits of elasticity is where network transformation outpaces modernisation of service performance and fault management capabilities. Here, dozens of legacy systems risk being overwhelmed by the demands of next-generation services.

Adding to this pressure on operators, vintage OSS vendors are undergoing their own transformation journeys, opting to phase out rather than update current mainstay solutions. Successor offerings may then not match operators’ evolving requirements, pushing them towards eking out end-of-life solutions or feeling obliged to default to an incumbent’s sub-optimal replacement.

There is another way…

Speaking to TelcoTitans, senior leaders from Ciena’s network software division Blue Planet suggested that the current moment of change should be seized upon as an opportunity.

To avoid reactive next steps, and short-term solutions that merely maintain the status quo, operators should prioritise the transformation needs of the critical field of service assurance in the same way as they do other key components of their business.

This way, they can ensure the outcome is a capability that is AI-enabled, optimised for end-to-end management across multiple networks, and future-proofed.

Benefits are considerable, not only in terms of operational efficiency but also in enabling the operator to realise the wider business gains offered by modernisation and automation across their infrastructure and systems.

Kailem Anderson, VP of Global Products & Delivery at the network automation specialist, envisages update of service assurance systems as critical to making good on ambitions for cloud-native environments capable of delivering closed-loop operation into the network “in a true declarative model”.

“I think this is where our customers want to go”, Anderson says, adding, “and this is where the vision of cloud-native operations support system can take you”.

No time to ‘make do and mend’

The changing of the guard on service assurance solutions is coming at a time when network complexity is massively increasing.

Older solutions that were built (and heavily-customised) for a time when networks were relatively static and siloed are ill-suited for the new more dynamic era.

They are incapable of managing demands brought with the growth-oriented business use cases that accompany 5G, IoT, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), and the embrace of other new technologies.

Gabriele Di Piazza, VP of Products, Data Sciences and Alliances at Blue Planet, warns that ‘make do and mend’, or locking in to a successor proprietary assurance system from a ‘same old vendor’, may not be a viable solution long term.

Vendor products “built for a different time and place” remain highly fragmented, demanding customisation and integration to operate within operators’ increasingly complex and fast-changing network environments.

Legacy vendors’ development focus can also be unaligned with an operator’s own future direction, notes Di Piazza, where the latter’s “goal is to accelerate the shift to more automated, AI-driven operations, leveraging intent to remove some complexity”.

This viewpoint is echoed in findings from OSS analysts Appledore Research, which highlight that the deluge of siloed and mismatched data, complexities of cloudification, increasing need for real-time network operations capability, and the overall high costs of owning and maintaining legacy solutions (tech debt), means that a patchwork solution will simply not cut it.

“It’s far too business-critical for that”, explains Consulting Analyst Robert Curran, who warns that “customers will spot the difference quickly between operators who can provide and assure a modern service, in a modern way, against modern expectations, and those whose retention strategy appears to be based simply on customer inertia”.

This reflects the outlook of Joe Cumello, Blue Planet’s SVP and General Manager, who recently observed that traditional OSS processes can be “costly and labour-intensive”, with support increasingly limited. They are also ill-suited to meeting the needs of more complex networks, and their multi-layer, multi-vendor, multi-domain environments.

In contrast, modernising with an open, flexible, and standards-based approach to service assurance is proving able to support operators in their quest to deliver new services faster, and to play a more active role in their wider digital ecosystem, while at the same time helping streamline end-to-end network operations and simplifying integration.

By delivering on a carefully balanced approach to modernisation and drawing on these recommendations, operators should find themselves well positioned to reap the rewards that are incentivising the drive towards cloudification, without restrictive legacy systems acting as a brake on progress.

In an upcoming article, the team from Blue Planet further discuss how multiple major operators in North America are already successfully following this path of rapid assurance transformation at scale. Deployments with operators in Europe are also now picking up the pace, with their systems becoming more responsive and customers benefitting.