Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing has ushered IT enterprise and service providers into a new era that redefines the way IT resources and services are delivered and consumed. Cloud computing can help service providers in two key domains — infrastructure optimization and new service offers. Infrastructure optimization has a greater impact on internal operations, and new service offers has a greater impact on external offerings to the market.

NetCracker’s cloud solutions are designed to help service providers in both these domains. In the case of infrastructure optimization, by pooling together disparate and distributed physical resources, such as computing and storage, for on-demand instantiation and self-service delivery with elastic scaling of resources, service providers can dramatically reduce the total cost of operations.

In the case of creating and delivering new cloud-based services, NetCracker’s solution provides the complete underlying infrastructure including the BSS and OSS, data center and management, and application hosting, to enable service providers to create and deliver new services to their enterprise and mass market customers.

Business Challenge

A robust cloud-based solution can help service providers cope with an array of glaring problems they are facing today:

• Poorly optimized use of storage space and calculations
• Time-consuming and complicated delivery of new services
• Lack of data integrity and no holistic view of resources

Solution Description

The Cloud Computing solution combines IT, communications, and network innovation to enable the effective management of carrier cloud services.
The solution automates order-to-activate cycles for converged network and IT services, and this, in turn, accelerates service delivery times.

Furthermore, the solution ensures the overall optimization of network and IT resources and provides end-to-end SLA management of network and IT services as well as advanced capabilities for failure analysis.

The Cloud Computing solution includes these key elements:

• Unified IT and Network Management
• Visualization of network/IT physical and logical resources
• Unified configuration management, enabling better utilization of network and IT as well as OpEx reduction
• Unified, centralized management of network and IT resources
• Rapid and Flexible Service Provisioning and Activation
• Modeling of user service and data center/network resources
• Flow-through service provisioning — from service order receipt to resource assignment
• Unified Fault and Quality Management
• Visualization of network and IT resource performance as well as identification of bottlenecks and "silent failures"
• Capacity management through future load predictions
• Fault management of network and IT resources

In addition, the core cloud data center management functionality is enhanced by network virtualization capabilities that allow the support of multi-vendor switches, while creating topology independent virtual networks. This enables better physical network resource utilization through network resource pooling and reduces network design and (re)configuration time and complexities.

Solution Benefits

Cloud computing is attracting the attention of a growing number of organizations and CIOs. This is due to its potential for:

• Reducing the need for capital investment
• Making operational costs more predictable
• Improving the availability of services
• Enabling organizations to respond to variable demand
• Enabling the quick launch of new cloud-oriented services by orchestrating IT and network resources
• Minimizing OpEx through automated operations and visualization of IT and network resources
• Optimizing IT and network resources for cloud-oriented services
• Improving customer experience through end-to-end SLA management of IT and network resources
• Reducing problem resolution times

NetCracker offers service providers cloud computing functionality in relation to their BSS/OSS. NetCracker has proven billing capabilities in cloud, be it public or private.

Beyond improving efficiencies and reducing costs by utilizing cloud computing, service providers are presented with revenue growth opportunities by being able to offer cloud services to the enterprise and consumer segments. NetCracker’s BSS offering has remarkable monetization capabilities that enable the realization of revenue growth goals.

NetCracker, together with NEC, brings a unique perspective to address exciting new opportunities in all industries looking to leverage the power of ubiquitous connectivity, real-time transactions, and compelling customer experience. Leveraging NEC’s strengths in Network and IT along with NetCracker’s deep expertise in the management and monetization of infrastructure, services, and applications, our solutions bring together the best of software, services, and platforms to create the most comprehensive, end-to-end portfolio in the industry.

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