The future, and likely your future, may rest with the ability to bridge this divide. To put it into perspective, imagine yourself in a self-driving car when a connectivity or quality of service issue occurs. There is simply no time or place for manual intervention. And this case is only one of many new use cases facing the industry today. Extreme as that case may be, it’s becoming a reality along with the demand for other advanced services and the need for new networking technology. To evolve, we must bridge the rift between the tools and systems of yesterday, the demands of today, and the systems of tomorrow. Failing to do so condemns you to the same fate as the old switchboard and operator.

The Federos Future

Pipeline recently had the opportunity to discuss bridging this rift with Federos’ CEO David Knight. Federos is a leading provider of next-generation, unified service management solutions that help its customers—service providers, managed service providers, and financial services enterprises—better meet the challenges of shifting from legacy systems to meeting the demands of the future. 

“Operational executives are realizing that 'another tool' doesn't solve their problems,” says Knight. “They need to simplify their environment, and provide an end-to-end view of services across all the domains the service provider has in place.”

Knight goes on to explain that many of the tools and solutions service providers have in place today were built in the ‘90s or later, and each was designed to solve a very specific problem. He says this approach won’t work as new technologies continue to advance to meet the constant change. He goes on to explain that their customers’ new services span both new and legacy domains, and there is a need to have a single interface and a “single source of truth” to provide an end-to-end view of services.

“Customers of ours like, like Eir in Ireland, have been able to reduce their response time, with fewer resources, and reduce their resolution time by having in place one location to understand where the problem is, what's causing it, and what they need to resolve.”

Federos’ award-winning products collect information from both virtualized and legacy (e.g. switch) environments so that service providers can look across all domains, explore the underlying topology, identify where the problems really are, and examine the cause and effect of events and issue that are impacting services.

Making Virtualization a Reality

Federos has also deployed a solution with Ericsson and Verizon that provides service assurance for enterprise customers with a closed-loop management for virtual network functions (VNFs)—the first solution in the industry to be production-ready and fully support and automate network function virtualizations (NFV) initiatives for business transformation. 

The solution features closed-loop service assurance with zero-touch automation and validation, a single source of truth, automated business processes; and automated service provisioning, orchestration and assurance from customer order, service instantiation, to decommission. All changes are handled in real-time via automated system-to-system communications. In addition, BPM workflows include both automated and human validation steps. System-to-system APIs allow changes to be shared in real-time between order management, customer management, inventory, orchestration, provisioning, incident management and service assurance.

“This is a very unique approach to service assurance,” Knight comments. “Federos is providing a platform that aggregates information from legacy, cloud, and virtual domains and enabling end-to-end service assurance to monitor SLAs so if an issue, update, or event is triggered, further action can be taken automatically.”  But making virtual network technologies a reality is just the beginning of bridging the digital rift.