Agility is fundamental to this new world, driving operators to implement software-defined and virtualized networks to act and react to new business situations with speed and efficiency. Characteristics of these can change in milliseconds. They set up dedicated network resources on demand as services or applications require and then automatically modify the network in real time to optimize quality, cost, or experience. Software efficiently provisions and manages network assets on telco-grade, scalable architectures.

While a growing number of services will be provided on virtualized network functions, many services will remain as physical functions for the foreseeable future. So services must be orchestrated efficiently and seamlessly across this hybrid physical and virtual environment. Operators require cloud-based, cross-domain, multi-vendor management and control capabilities that can handle the life cycle, configuration, performance and workload of both physical and virtual functions at the same time.

Business transformation journey

Traditionally, operator focus has been on building a global infrastructure of mobile networks with built-in intelligence to provide the best customer experience, performance, and efficiency. The resulting advances have enabled the Networked Society. Now, as the industry and consumers are digitalizing, operators realize that building intelligence into the network is not enough. To power the next phase of growth, they also need to use software intelligence to better bridge their network and operational capabilities and to provide service differentiation, rapid time-to-market, and a high level of customer experience. Yes, network transformation is important. But business and operations must evolve in parallel.

If network functions can be changed in milliseconds for a new service, it should not take weeks or months to bring those services to the market and monetize them. The operator’s business IT also needs to become equally real-time, with results-oriented agility that leverages the dynamic capabilities of the network while meeting the personalized needs of customers, applications, and IoT. The power of transformative IT can help operators manage the complexity of change, speed the adoption of new technologies, and add intelligence to the end result. This IT intelligence, in the form of integrated and process-oriented software solutions for charging and billing, customer and product management, customer and partner interaction, data analytics, infrastructure, and service management and control, is a prerequisite to support real-time transactions, real-time insights, and real-time automation.

Operators are using the power of IT software to streamline internal processes, change business models and embrace new revenue and value-producing business opportunities brought about by the Networked Society.

However, just as the network domain is challenged to span legacy and new elements, operator systems must simultaneously support the core business in addition to new markets and business models.

The operator’s core communications and connectivity services are highly competitive and commoditized, with low margins and little feature variability between customers. To maximize profitability in these saturated markets, services must be supported with software solutions that have a high degree of automation and standardization. Processes should be triggered without human interaction. At the same time, they must support the digital consumer need for an omni-channel, self-serve, personalized customer experience.

On the other hand, to noticeably grow revenue, operators need to address new businesses, such as enabling two-sided business models, expanding wholesale business lines, and pursuing vertical industry opportunities. While representing great potential, these markets are also unpredictable, with a high rate of innovation, constantly changing business models, and new partners and competitors. This demands systems and processes with the highest level of agility to rapidly create, test, and monetize new ideas. It is about to be able to fail fast when an idea doesn’t take off and scale quickly when it does.

The deployment of IT intelligence lets operators easily add new services, service components, devices or partners through a platform that uses a centralized catalog, modular building blocks and open APIs to ensure the greatest reuse of product components along with easy integration and configuration. As a result, the operator can more effectively meet customer expectations through faster product development and personalized services.