Communications Service Providers (CSP) are continuously investing in their networks—incorporating new technologies, supporting new applications, offering new services—in order to provide cutting-edge customer experiences and address emerging market opportunities. Despite their efforts, legacy Operational Support Systems (OSSs) often prevent them from fully leveraging these investments. Now more than ever, CSPs need a modernized OSS stack that is open, automated, and agile.

Blue Planet helps CSPs meet that need with an open, comprehensive software suite that combines federated inventory, multi-domain service orchestration , route optimization and unified assurance and analytics.  At the same time, Blue Planet is also closely aligned with - and contributing to - industry consortiums that are defining reference architectures for new generation OSS (NG-OSS).

One such effort is the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, which has garnered solid support from many of the largest global CSPs. ONAP members are collaborating on a comprehensive platform for orchestrating and automating physical and virtual network functions, as well as support for complete lifecycle management.

Blue Planet is a silver member of ONAP, and we have demonstrated Blue Planet - ONAP interoperability using open standard interfaces in multiple public PoCs. In 2019, we also successfully integrated components from the ONAP policy framework into Blue Planet to create our sophisticated policy subsystem, which is optimized for advanced closed-loop automation applications.

Building directly on this success, we have announced our first major ONAP contribution. Together with a major service provider, Blue Planet is contributing significant new functionality and code to the ONAP Policy Framework, which enables more robust policy-driven orchestration capabilities and benefits a multitude of intent-based automation use cases for the ONAP community.

Press Release
Blue Planet Contributes to ONAP to Accelerate Automation Initiatives

Additionally, while ONAP development progresses, many CSPs are facing significant market pressure to accelerate their automation initiatives.  It’s with these CSPs in mind that we have also introduced a new approach to simplify the integration of mature, production-hardened Blue Planet components within ONAP.

Case Study
Blue Planet Inventory transforms operations at a major CSP

This will let CSPs use standard TMF Open APIs to integrate microservices-based Blue Planet components—such as our policy subsystem, orchestration engine, topology / PCE, federated inventory, service assurance, the resource adapter framework and others—into their ONAP deployment, in order to supplement and enhance key ONAP functions. Ultimately, this gives them the freedom to build an NG-OSS software stack that combines best-in-class open-source and commercial solutions, while our experienced professional services team is well-equipped to support their efforts.

These endeavors demonstrate Blue Planet’s ongoing commitment to work within the ONAP ecosystem, and to help CSPs accelerate their automation initiatives. This approach is also consistent with broader NG-OSS objectives:

  • Agility: speeds up and simplifies new technology and service introductions;
  • Modular: allows CSPs to select best-in-class functions from different vendors or open source;
  • Standards-based interoperability: uses TMF Open APIs between Blue Planet, ONAP, and other commercial and/or open-source functional elements.

We are excited to be working even more closely with the ONAP community and to extend the power of Blue Planet to the CSPs who are also aligned with the ONAP vision. Let the innovation begin!