Service providers are in the midst of an operational transformation. The Blue Planet customers I talk to tell me that, for them, transformation means being able to quickly introduce new services and technologies to meet end-customers’ needs, while also improving operations efficiency. SD-WAN and Flex-grid are two such innovative technologies that have come up in this context on a regular basis.

Yesterday’s systems can slow today’s progress

One crucial aspect of service providers’ operations that can slow their ability to introduce these new technologies is inventory management. Many legacy inventory systems in place today were designed more than a decade (or two!) ago, and were optimized to be used with traditional circuit-based technologies from that era – think SONET/SDH and T1s/E1s. This rigid and static environment, combined with the numerous ‘swivel-chairs’ between multiple systems that are often required, makes operating modern, software-enabled networks a next-to-impossible task.

Making sense of all the data

The good news is, there’s a better way. A growing number of customers are beginning to take advantage of the ability to federate information from multiple inventory and other related OSS systems, as well as unified visualization, to address these challenges and introduce new technologies to their customers more quickly. A case study recently published by Appledore Research provides a great example of a large US-based Communications Service Provider (CSP) that modernized its approach to inventory management, allowing it to significantly improve operational efficiency and substantially reduce costs.

As discussed in the case study, this CSP’s legacy operational environment was made up of multiple inventory systems that weren’t integrated: a mix of commercial off the shelf (COTS) platforms, home-grown tools, and offline MS Visio topology diagrams and MS Excel spreadsheets. What’s more, the CSP’s legacy inventory systems struggled to support newer IP-optimized services such as SD-WAN, Metro Ethernet, and Flex-grid, requiring a messy workaround – modeling them as ‘pseudo circuits’ – to be useable.

With end-to-end visualization and federation in place, the CSP can now diagnose issues much more quickly – they’ve reduced mean time to identification from 1 hour down to 20 minutes, and shaved approximately 30 minutes from each technical support call from their enterprise customers.

From swivel-chair to single pane of glass

Working with the Blue Planet team, the CSP now has a single federated inventory environment that provides a complete and current visualization of their network, spanning multiple operational domains and inventory platforms. They also decommissioned two obsolete inventory systems that struggled to support the operational and modelling requirements for the new software-enabled services and technologies.

With end-to-end visualization and federation in place, the CSP can now diagnose issues much more quickly – they’ve reduced mean time to identification from 1 hour down to 20 minutes, and shaved approximately 30 minutes from each technical support call from their enterprise customers.

This unified network view has been game-changing for their operations staff, who can now make decisions rapidly with complete network context in a single pane of glass, rather than swivel chair to multiple systems. This has reduced service design time from hours to under a minute.

Fast time to value and time to market

The operational savings from the new solution have been significant, to say the least. The CSP calculates that Blue Planet Inventory allows them to save approximately 12 hours per week for each of their personnel, for a total savings of $1.2 million per week (based on 6,000 users).

Finally, Blue Planet has allowed the service provider to introduce innovative new services and technologies much more quickly. The CSP was first to market with an SD-WAN offer in North America, deployed Flex-grid in their IP transport backbone, and is confident they have a platform that will support the rapid roll-out of new technology and services in the future.

Read the full case study to learn more about how the visualization provided by Blue Planet can provide network operators with a strong foundation for OSS rationalization, transformation and automation.

And contact us to find out how inventory visualization and federation can help you accelerate the introduction of new technologies and services.

Case Study
Blue Planet Inventory transforms operations at a major CSP