Rethinking NaaS as a journey to openness and automation

What is Network as a Service (NaaS)? It’s a simple enough question, but there is a lot of confusion in the marketplace about the answer.

Some common misconceptions or myths about NaaS are that it is just a new way for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to sell virtualized services to enterprises, that its only about operations support system transformation through open and programmable APIs, or that it means the same thing as software-defined networking (SDN).

Perhaps the biggest misconception, however, is that NaaS isn’t real – that it is a futuristic goal. While NaaS is, indeed, a ‘future state’ vision for CSPs, they can and are using it in production environments today.

I like to think of NaaS as an evolutionary journey toward a network, operations and business architecture that is open, agile and automated. Successful completion of this journey will result in digital transformation that allows CSPs to take back control of their networks, save on operational costs, increase innovation, accelerate time to market, and improve customer experience.

By using standards-based architectures and open APIs, NaaS provides common abstraction between the network, operations, and B/OSS layers, so that CSPs have a consistent way for these layers to ‘talk’ to each other. The BSS talks to the order management layer, and order management talks to services orchestration, which then communicates with various domains like the optical domain, a business service domain or the 5G domain.

Getting Rid of the Spaghetti

CSPs are all too familiar with the ‘spaghetti’ integration that has plagued their Business and Operations Support System (B/OSS) infrastructure. Traditionally, network domains and operational processes have been tightly coupled, which means that all new network elements must be integrated manually with B/OSS. Routine operational processes also involve people – technicians who access the B/OSS to gather information to design, activate and assure services.

This approach results in high costs, very slow time to market, and limited ability to scale. It cannot support cloud-based business models, on-demand services, or even new technologies like 5G.

By using standards-based architectures and open APIs, NaaS provides common abstraction between the network, operations, and B/OSS layers, so that CSPs have a consistent way for these layers to ‘talk’ to each other. The BSS talks to the order management layer, and order management talks to services orchestration, which then communicates with various domains like the optical domain, a business service domain or the 5G domain. This ultimately allows our CSP customers to eliminate the spaghetti integration, replacing it with an open, modular NaaS architecture that decouples the B/OSS and network.

A major benefit or byproduct of this transformation is that CSPs can deliver all kinds of new services to customers, from SD-WAN to wavelength services to 5G bandwidth on demand. They can even offer their customers self-service capabilities.

AT&T and Blue Planet worked together as part of a recent TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept to demonstrate these capabilities. The team showed how an enterprise customer could use a self-service portal to order a 100 Gigabit wavelength service connecting two US cities, and the results were impressive. AT&T concluded that adopting a NaaS architecture may reduce the time it takes to go from innovation to cash for optical wavelength services by 50%.