"At STC, we have a 'customer-first' approach. We aim to earn our customers' trust and enrich society with comprehensive, innovative services and solutions,” said Dr. Tarig M Enaya, senior vice-president for enterprise at Saudi Telecom Company, in a statement. “The network, underpinned by advanced NFV and automation capabilities, can deliver substantial value to our customers by providing the agility, speed and simplicity that today's businesses require."

And STC isn’t alone in those efforts, even in that region. Computer Weekly notes that in the last year and a half, UAE-based Du claimed to be the first in the region to internally test NFV, UAE-based Etisalat deployed AlcaLu’s NFV-based radio control, and Ooredoo Kuwait announced a unified cloud based on VMware’s vCloud. And that’s just in one part of the world. Businesses around the globe are relying on virtualization to help them run lean and capitalize on new opportunities.

Analytics

Being agile also means being self-aware. Cats wouldn’t be nearly so able to deftly creep through darkened hallways without the aid of sharp eyes and a set of whiskers. Similarly, carriers must be aware of their current network performance and resource utilization before they can roll out new products and services. As ECI Telecom’s Gali Malkiel noted in a blog post earlier this year, “from a project perspective, analytics can decrease much of the network planning work that needs to happen before the deployment phase can begin. Without this information, operators are often forced to overprovision to ensure that the new service delivers at customer expectations.”

Better analytics enable carriers to right-size their networks and properly allocate their resources, making sure everyone is ready for a big move when it happens. In addition, robust analytics can help keep unnecessary truck rolls and tower climbs to a minimum, reducing overhead and keeping carriers lean.

Catalog

And just as it’s important to know what your network is doing and where new resources are most necessary, it’s also important to understand your current offerings, their component parts, and how to reconfigure these parts to create a new and exciting new product or bundle. And that boils down to having a catalog.

We’ve written on many occasions about the power of catalogs in the communications realm, but it bears repeating. Know your offerings. Stay organized. Build from component parts.

Catalog offerings from Amdocs, Ericsson, Sigma, goTransverse and many more offer carriers the ability to better understand and reconfigure their product and service offerings, speeding time-to-market up a great deal. And as was mentioned before, you can allow subscribers to manage their own offerings, to an extent, through self-care portals, and if the catalog, analytics, and other support systems are in place, the customer feels new ownership over their accounts while you spend less on provisioning a new service.

Open Source

And then there’s the agility that can be obtained by taking advantage of work already being done by a community of standards bodies, vendors, and other aficionados and tinkerers from the world of open source. OpenStack has made strides as a reliable cloud platform, and carriers have an even more powerful tool at their disposal with the development of OPNFV, an open source platform for NFV products and services.

The OPNFV project integrates components of OpenStack, OpenDaylight, KVM, Linux and other open source projects to create a carrier-grade launchpad for virtualization. Project members include AT&T, Cisco, Dell, China Mobile, NTT Docomo, IBM and many other major carriers and vendors from around the world. It’s a quick way to speed along new offerings while standing on the shoulders of a dynamic community.

Innovation framework

And if the allure of an open source framework speaks to you, you might be interested in some of the innovation frameworks available from ICE technology vendors. The Ericsson Service Innovation Framework, for instance, combines some of the components I’ve already mentioned (product catalog, customer self-care) with a comprehensive service delivery and OSS/BSS framework while also adding a crucial additional component I’ve yet to address: ecosystem management.

Collaboration is the key to speed, and a robust partner ecosystem can be a tremendous resource.

So what’s your plan? How are you staying agile in this fast-moving world? Are you dashing like Usain? Hoisting like Lasha? Flipping like Simone? Or are you managing to do all of those things at the same time?