Aging assurance systems are putting your business at risk. Blue Planet has a solution.

As a Communications Service Provider (CSP), retiring legacy systems to drive down costs is already a major driver of your ongoing Operational Support System (OSS) transformation. But what happens when support for a business-critical legacy system, like a service assurance or fault management platform, is being phased out and the vendor is forcing migration to something else?

Many CSPs with aging assurance systems are facing this exact challenge, which can result in operational disruptions and increased costs, not to mention the risk of service downtime and unhappy customers. You may think you have limited options – either maintaining those end-of-life (EoL) systems with additional customization or migrating to the legacy vendor’s new solution – but Blue Planet has a more future-proof alternative that is cloud-native, AI-driven and optimized for end-to-end assurance across multiple network domains and layers.

Making the right choice

The role of service assurance is becoming more critical as network complexity increases and new competitors emerge. Legacy assurance systems were built for a different time and place – when networks were simpler, relatively static, and managed in silos. Such systems are fragmented and highly customized, requiring labor-intensive manual processes. They simply can’t leverage advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities or cope with the high-volume, real-time, and dynamically changing world of 5G, Network as a Service (NaaS) and Internet of Things (IoT).

Modernizing service assurance as part of the migration to a cloud-native OSS platform will enable you to play a more active role in today’s digital ecosystem by creating and delivering innovative new services – and to reduce costs by streamlining end-to-end operations and simplifying integration. The idea is to accelerate your shift to more automated, AI-driven operations.

Understanding the consequences

CSPs face many potential consequences in sticking with the status quo or even moving to a new proprietary assurance system from the same vendor. The biggest challenge is that legacy vendors’ solutions remain highly fragmented, requiring extensive customization and integration. Plus, the suppliers themselves are not specifically focused on building solutions and products designed to enable CSP’s OSS transformation.

As Robert Curran, Consulting Analyst at Appledore Research, explains in this Blue Planet blog, a “make-do-and-mend” strategy for assurance won’t cut it. “It’s far too business-critical for that,” he says. “And 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.”

UAA for AI-powered operations

Blue Planet Unified Assurance and Analytics (UAA), which is integrated within the Blue Planet Cloud Native Platform (CNP), simplifies the transition to automated, AI-driven operations with much less risk. As shown in Figure 1 below, some of UAA’s most important differentiating features are its unified, AI-driven architecture, no-code/low-code customizability, and open, flexible integration. These capabilities give CSPs a single pane of glass to view their service and network topology across multiple layers and domains, leveraging a variety of pre-built AI use cases as well as integrating AI models developed by their own data scientists.

Figure 1. As part of the Blue Planet Cloud Native Platform, UAA provides CSPs unparalleled functionality and flexibility to assure their networks and services.

Success stories

Many network operators have already made the leap from aging assurance systems to Blue Planet Assurance and are realizing the benefits. For example, a large North American cable operator whose legacy assurance system was unable to scale wanted to deploy a new system within a very short implementation window. Blue Planet helped the company quickly realize end-to-end network and service assurance with UAA.

The operator now has AI-powered assurance across multiple networks and is also leveraging Blue Planet Inventory’s understanding of the multi-domain topology to aid root-cause analysis. Figure 2 below shows the company’s legacy versus target state.

Figure 2. A North American cable operator trades legacy assurance for the benefits of AI-powered service assurance with Blue Planet.

Another North American CSP operating an extensive multi-vendor optical transport network uses Blue Planet to simplify its trouble-to-resolution process and predict potential outages. The company faced challenges as it relied on different vendor-specific element management systems (EMS) and custom scripts to extract network topology. This often required interpreting hand-drawn diagrams and navigating cumbersome manual processes for root cause analysis.

The operator turned to Blue Planet to predict fiber failures before they impact services. Using AI and machine learning (ML), Blue Planet identifies fiber degradation up to 7 days in advance with a probability of greater than 95%. This allows the operator to validate and mitigate potential service impacts by proactively addressing the root cause of possible failure before any outage occurs, which has significant benefits in avoiding SLA penalties for high-value services and out-of-hours operational costs. It also provides real-time and historical visibility into network routing and changes, cross-layer port stitching, and the ability to drill down through multiple network layers in a single pane of glass. As a result, the operator has been able to improve not only network optimization but also planning and monetization.

A better solution for replacing aging assurance systems

It’s clear that sticking with aging systems or migrating to a legacy vendor’s new solution are not your only choices when it comes to modernizing business-critical assurance systems. Blue Planet UAA offers a more future-proof alternative that allows you to transition to automated, AI-driven operations and a modern user experience with significantly less risk and simpler integration.

By modernizing service assurance as a key step in your journey to a cloud-native OSS platform, you will be able to reduce costs and streamline operations. Perhaps even more importantly, you’ll have a path to new revenue through your ability to play a bigger role in digital ecosystems and ensure that your business-critical assurance processes are ready for the future.