Boost your bottom line with automated service delivery
By automating service provisioning and turn-up across your multi-vendor network, you can reduce time-consuming manual processes and staffing costs, and speed up order to cash. All it takes is a little network intelligence from Ciena, says Dan Chillcott, Vice President of Sales at Ciena. This article was originally published in LinkedIn.
In today’s job market, skilled network operations engineers are worth their weight in gold, so you’ll be wanting to get the most out of yours. That’s easier said than done, though, especially with so many manual steps needed to provision and deploy new services over your multi-vendor network.
In some cases we’ve seen, a whole team of people work full-time just to discover where network resources are, to route new services over the network, and to turn them up for customers. As well as increasing OPEX, highly manual provisioning processes distract operations teams from more value-added tasks – like preventative maintenance or planning capacity for the next big service or application.
It’s time to automate
We are fully aware of the challenges of manual service provisioning in multi-vendor environments. That’s why we are currently running service-delivery-automation Proof of Concepts with some of our biggest tier-1 customers.
In one of our PoCs, we’ve been able to show how a multi-faceted provisioning process for delivering new Business Ethernet services can be automated from end to end in a multi-vendor environment. We’ve done this with our Blue Planet network automation and orchestration software, which is able to automatically identify required network resources, create best available routes across them, and turn up and scale new services – all with minimal manual interventions.
Customers are often prepared to pay a significant premium (often up to 10% more) for services with shorter delivery SLAs. By factoring this value into your commercial model, you could increase margins on your services and achieve new competitive differentiation for your brand.
Why automate your service delivery with Ciena and Blue Planet?
First and foremost, Ciena's Blue Planet automation software allows carriers to reduce staffing costs dramatically, or to re-direct resources to more value-added activities. Our research shows the scale of cost-saving opportunities, with an estimated 67% OPEX reduction for carriers who can successfully strip out manual processes and automate service provisioning from end to end.
Secondly, our research shows that automating service provisioning and turn-up capabilities with Blue Planet allows carriers to reduce time-to-market by approximately 15% (therefore gaining an additional billing cycle). This means that your customers can get their own solutions to market faster and realize benefits quicker, which gives you the jump on your competitors.
Thirdly, by automating service delivery in multi-vendor environments, our software allows carriers to route and turn-up services across your existing infrastructure with no major forklift equipment upgrades. As well as making it possible to deliver a range of new services immediately, this helps to extend the useful lifecycle – and ROI – for your existing network assets.
And lastly, but very importantly, customers are often prepared to pay a significant premium (often up to 10% more) for services with shorter delivery SLAs. By factoring this value into your commercial model, you could increase margins on your services and achieve new competitive differentiation for your brand.
Automation is the future of networking
By helping you to automate the delivery of a range of complex use cases and services, Blue Planet software feeds into Ciena’s broader Adaptive Network vision.
The Adaptive Network is a new approach that expands on autonomous networking concepts to transform the static network into a dynamic, programmable environment. It uses automation, guided by analytics and intent based policies, to rapidly scale, self-configure, and self-optimise by constantly assessing network pressures and demands. It is built on three key foundational elements: programmable infrastructure; analytics and intelligence; and software control and automation.
Bringing these elements to life will take time; it will be an evolution of the current network environment – with the end goal that every aspect of network and service management is automated from end-to-end, delivering major operational savings for your business.
Automation across the entire network will also enable you to slice your infrastructure and resources to deliver a range of 5G use cases with different performance and latency requirements. With minimal manual interventions required to deliver even the most complex services, you’ll be able to deploy 5G at scale and gain critical first mover advantage.
