In addition to the southbound integration to the existing network, the service assurance application will drive northbound integration to existing OSS/BSS systems, NOC consoles, customer portals and big data analytic frameworks. There is a clear industry trend toward open interfaces such as RESTful APIs to integrate service orchestration with these higher layer systems.

To continue delivering existing services, the new application must interoperate with existing OSS and BSS systems, often requiring the support of legacy protocols such as TL1 or CORBA. These systems will likely be transforming in parallel to the service orchestration system. However, during the parallel transformations, OSS/BSS system performance may not keep pace with the service orchestration system. This may require solutions like fault mediation within the service orchestration system to prioritize and buffer accelerated and multi-source event streams.

Even with increased automation, humans must have accurate and timely visibility of network conditions. Network operations need an NOC console to intuitively visualize this data and enact corrective measures. To discourage another silo growth spurt, service providers need flexible visualization tools that are not service assurance specific and enable a single-pane view across the entire service orchestration system. Similarly, new service assurance applications often include an upgraded, secure customer portal. Again, these portals should be general enough to accommodate on-demand service ordering and serve as a marketing channel.

Lastly, many service providers are looking to big data analytics techniques to improve their operations. The valuable data collected by the service assurance application must be accessible to these tools, preferably through a unified conduit for the entire service orchestration system. Hopefully, this data will enable predictive analysis to help anticipate issues before they impact customers, again enhancing the customer experience.

Summary and Next Steps

Many service providers are adopting the strategy of modernizing service assurance applications as a first step toward end-to-end service orchestration. This approach provides near-term advantages and benefits to the network operators and their customers. The deployment of a scalable service assurance solution will also simplify the future staged development of other service orchestration solutions, likely progressing to service fulfillment and then service inventory. If this staged implementation recognizes the longer term goals of service orchestration, this should prove an effective strategy.