Rebuilding on the Fly: NFV meets OSS/BSS
But the biggest difference is that your antique, pieced-together legacy network can’t shut down and rebuild. Like the highway, your legacy network has been supplemented and supplanted by a wide variety of newer pieces of infrastructure through the years, but unlike the highway, it is too crucial to take a day off, much less a year off. And the systems that support it have to remain in place as long as the network remains necessary.
This is the painful heart of OSS/BSS transformation.
Virtualization is doing remarkable things, and NFV orchestration has come so far. But it can’t do everything, and OSS/BSS transformation has to happen without interrupting anything that your subscribers will notice.
And obviously, all future plans should prominently feature virtualization and automation. As Hutchinson CTO Stephen Hampton pointed out in a guest post on Cisco’s blog, CSPs have been understanding about the slow-going of networks to address complex issues surrounding automation, distributed configuration, heterogeneous environments, and service insertion. “However, now in 2017, both SDN and NFV have matured and there is no longer an excuse,” Hampton writes. “If your network is not software defined, then it is legacy.”
But here’s where the underlying aspects of NFV management and orchestration (MANO) can be leveraged to transform legacy OSS/BSS architecture, according to HPE’s handy special edition of “Network Functions Virtualization for Dummies.” [PDF]
(And yeah, I’m immediately on board with anything that lets me admit I am a dummy.):
In order to take advantage of the flexibility of NFV, OSS needs to be automated, catalog-driven, intent-based, and data-focused. There needs to be a real-time awareness of resources, a tight watch on assurance, and an automated and speedy path to fulfillment as a result of this overall awareness.
That catalog-driven approach has long been promoted by vendors such as Sigma Systems (and the now-absorbed Tribold before), and the firm’s solutions were recently featured in a Stratecast report on the way forward for hybrid services. Catalogs, in short, are crucial.
“Nowhere else can configuration data, product and services descriptors, order management processes, configure-price-quote attributes, and data on both physical and virtual network assets be combined and correlated,” said author Tim McElligott, Senior Consulting Analyst within the Stratecast Operations, Orchestration, Data Analytics & Monetization practice, in a statement. “Catalogs can support both ETSI and TM Forum specifications and information models.”
We all know NFV is on the rise. Forecasts a few months back had it growing at a CAGR of nearly 33% through 2020. But there’s no closing down this highway. We have to build it all on the fly, transforming as we go. That’s what makes the ongoing modernization and transformation of OSS/BSS absolute table stakes in the years to come. It may not seem like the world’s best plan to invest in technology that is anything less than cutting edge, but there’s still an awful lot we can’t or won’t virtualize.
It’s a hybrid life for us, then, and that means taking the crucial lessons offered by NFV and using them to make our legacy support systems more agile and more intuitive.
