Building a Foundation for Transformation

Today, this large number of incompatible interfaces is held together by large numbers of engineers and technicians doing highly-manual operations tasks.  

Even to support the highly-manual mode of operations, significant systems integration work attempting to tie together these non-compatible systems is required.

Because of the large number of operations interfaces, the fact that they are changing, this systems integration work is ongoing and struggles to catch up.  Because of its ongoing nature, some have begun to characterize this cost as the "integration tax". As networks have grown in size, complexity, and volatility, this integration tax has started to grow exponentially.

The resulting manual partially integrated network suffers problems in Quality of Service (QoS) while 93% of network problems are a result of human intervention.

To attempt to overcome these QoS challenges, more resources are thrown at the network than would otherwise be needed. Finally, these highly- manual, partially-integrated operations systems dramatically limit the speed of development and deployment of new services leading to diversion of revenue to OTT providers.

The transition to NFV/SDN promises cost savings and increased flexibility and agility. However, given the long useful life of installed legacy systems, the transition will take decades. The danger is that, in this transition period, NFV and SDN will produce more incompatible operations data silos, increasing the integration tax. This increase in the integration tax has the potential to more than offset any savings from NFV/SDN.

But now competitive pressure are mounting. For example, Apple and Xiaomi have started selling phones directly to consumers on a monthly installment plan. Xiaomi has gone a step further in creating an MVNO in China such that customers can buy a phone and service from Xiaomi. Thus, Xiaomi can negotiate with the operators in China to get the best pricing, playing one off against the other.

Similarly, Google's Project Fi service is currently available by invitation only to maintain high quality while they scale up the service. They have been working in this mode for more than two years. Google has MVNO contracts with both Sprint and T-Mobile. The service works in conjunction with a Nexus phone that senses instantaneous quality of service (QoS) from both operators and automatically switches between them to get the best service at the moment.

If Google rolls out this service, Apple decides to combine its phones and a service in a similar fashion, and/or Xiaomi takes its service international, pricing pressure for traditional mobile operators will become much greater. At the same time, QoS will become even more important. Network problems in a specific area will not just result in frustrated customers who have to consider contracts and the hassle of changing providers. Instead, impaired QoS will result in an immediate loss of traffic and a concomitant loss of revenue.  So not only will Telco’s face the costs of highly-manual operations, the integration tax, and difficulty fielding new services, their basic traditional service revenue will come under attack. 

Thus, if Google, Apple and Xiaomi roll out their services on a wide scale, the current siloed ops problem may become an existential problem for many Telcos. The danger is -- just as a frog in a frying pan doesn’t react to slow changes in the heat of the pan -- telcos slowed by not-so-agile traditional vendors and competing internal camps have been reacting too slowly to the recurring incremental changes. What underlies all this is the fundamental fact that traditional vendors facing technical and business challenges have not been able to solve the silo problem. This leaves the telcos, like frogs in a frying pan, getting hotter and hotter.

What is needed is a solution that can be quickly deployed as an overlay, preserving the undepreciated investment in existing infrastructure while unifying the ops silos and preparing a solid foundation for Transformation. Not only are the traditional vendors not in a position to provide this solution, traditional technology cannot deal with the combination of scale, complexity, and volatility required. Thus, what is needed is an innovative solution delivered in an innovative fashion.

A more detailed technical description of that solution has been recently published by IEEE Communications magazine (Wac, Katarzyna; Cummings, Mark; Dey, Jayanta; “e2eUberIM: End-to-End Service Management Framework for Anything-As-a-Service,” IEEE Communications magazine, March 2016). In this example a small, innovative company with breakthrough technology is partnered with a larger service-oriented vendor. This provides assurance to the telco that a high quality product that fully meets their needs based on innovative technology will be delivered and well supported.  At the same time it also allows the traditional vendors to continue to differentiate their products and protect their margins.