TDC NET, Denmark’s largest provider of critical digital infrastructure, is undergoing a business and digital transformation. Focusing on innovation, TDC NET’s transformation includes 5G deployment, legacy infrastructure decommissioning, and the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This transformation aims to deliver a "Zero X" (zero wait, zero touch, zero trouble) customer experience, aligning with TM Forum's Autonomous Networks (AN) vision.
With over 140 years of history, it was unsurprising that TDC NET found itself navigating a fragmented Operations Support System (OSS) landscape scattered across 450 disparate applications in need of digital transformation.
Without automation, TDC NET was often manually battling complex, error-prone, and expensive-to-maintain processes. For instance, it could take network engineers more than four hours from the occurrence of an incident before discovery, 12 minutes to create a service ticket across multiple systems, and up to 48 hours to get a full overview of the customer and service impact.
"We have a lot of siloed IT systems and that means a lot of manual processes, a lot of compensation, a lot of complexity in the way that we run our business from an operational perspective," said Carsten Rasmussen, Vice President – Applications/Architecture/IT Enablement, TDC NET. "What do we need to do to be able to support the business in a better way? How can we streamline the processes and increase the automation of what we are doing?"
Building the Foundation to Serve Customers Better
TDC NET is leveraging Blue Planet Inventory (BPI), part of Blue Planet’s Cloud Native Platform, to provide a single, unified view of network resources and services across multiple domains, thereby streamlining and automating critical operational processes and delivering new, dynamic services more effectively. Sitting at the core of TDC NET’s network and services automation strategy, BPI provides a single pane of glass view for end-to-end visualization of network, operations, and IT processes. BPI also maintains data integrity via network discovery, federating multiple legacy inventory systems, and reconciling against fragmented legacy OSS data. With BPI driving automated workflows, TDC NET can accelerate network planning and design during the implementation of new digital services.
Carsten added: “One of the root causes to our challenges is that we don't have a single place where we can get a full overview of our network and our services and that is effectively what Blue Planet is helping us with. With Blue Planet, we're building the foundation because in my view, we cannot reach our autonomous network vision without a very clear, single source of truth for network information.”
By the end of the transformation, which also includes a Business Support Systems (BSS) transformation phase, TDC NET aims to consolidate on approximately 30 platforms, further standardize its processes with less than 10% deviation from out-of–the-box functions, and drive 85% end-to-end process automation across its OSS stack. This includes automating its incident management process to achieve near-instant issue identification and resolution and implementing preventive discovery. This transformation to more sustainable operations is expected to cut IT costs for TDC NET by half.
To learn more about how TDC NET is leveraging Blue Planet, you can refer to the press release, case study or this video.