March 26, 2020

Why Domain Orchestration is a Leading Principle of Digital Transformation

Network and service agility in the digital economy is the goal and domain orchestration will help enable it.

Today’s service providers see automation as a central principle of their transformation into true digital service providers. The ability to eliminate manual intervention in day-to-day network, service or business operations is now a primary goal, especially as virtually every provider faces business challenges from non-traditional competitors. Delivering new digital services effectively puts automation, consolidation and cross-domain process integration at the forefront of any next-generation operations strategy.

But automating service delivery across hybrid networks is no small task. Doing so requires addressing services that cross traditional OSS, SDN and NFV silos, as well as addressing the inherent complexities across those organizations. A new operations approach is needed that will break down silos to enable the next generation of digital services and experiences.

The path to get there is through domain orchestration.

A recent Analysys Mason report, “Domain Orchestration Prepares the Way for a Digital Network and Operations Platform (DNOP),” highlights that operators should adopt a long-term domain orchestration strategy, which will help them overcome operational obstacles without impeding success and eventually enable end-to-end network and service management automation. According to the report, the approach “involves collapsing existing service and network management silos by merging the operational capabilities of traditional OSS, network orchestration and SDN-based management and control around individual, self-sufficient hybrid ‘domains’ (where a domain may be a network technology layer, geographic region or service such as vCPE for example). Operators can define domains and develop a strategy for automating them incrementally based on their business requirements and existing organizational capabilities.”

Basically, a successful domain orchestration strategy initially requires identifying which technologies or business structures can be automated separately, but can eventually get tied to a larger automation strategy. These domains can be customer-facing services like vCPE, SD-WAN, a network domain such as IP/MPLS or even a geographical domain, such as the data center.

Service providers can then use a domain orchestrator to automate and manage the lifecycle of each service within a domain, ensuring that all critical processes, orchestration and real-time inventory work seamlessly, as seen in the figure below.

Modal

This de-centralized operations approach means faster time-to-service, improved operational efficiency, more service flexibility and, ultimately, happier customers who can consume the service bundles they want.

In the report, Analysys Mason concluded that service providers should:

  • “Build towards an open, cloud-native, common platform and platform services by adopting reusable/composable components (microservices), using industry-standard, open, intent-based APIs to ensure interworking of different domains as well as various vendor and open source solutions within/between the domains.
  • Use model-driven, programmable service design and deployment with common, industry-standard data models, templates and modeling languages.
  • Adopt DevOps tools and mindset for rapid creation, integration and management of service components.”

Netcracker’s next-generation operations strategy maps to these principles. Netcracker’s next-generation operations strategy maps to these principles. A good example is Netcracker Network Domain Orchestration, which combines Orchestration and OSS to fully automate the transport network. In fact, we are supporting many service providers with their digital transformation strategies, roadmap and implementations using this approach. This puts service agility as the ultimate goal.

We believe the evolution to domain orchestration will be essential to enabling network and service automation. Our Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) solution provides the building blocks for domain orchestration. By leveraging our experience in OSS and SDN/NFV, we have evolved HOM to break down OSS, SDN and NFV silos and help service provider deploy self-sufficient management and orchestration domains.

To download the Analysys Mason report, click here.

Click here more information about Netcracker’s next-gen OSS and domain orchestration strategies. 

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