Automation and Operational Excellence: The Role of OSS and Orchestration

At the event, Susan White, Head of SDN/NFV Portfolio Marketing at Netcracker, discussed how the expansion of virtual services is forcing the service provider community to transform their operations environment, automate business processes and embrace industry standards in her presentation, “Automation and Operational Excellence: The Role of OSS and Orchestration.”

As SDN tends to be deployed for a single domain today, the ability to automate on Day 0 can be defined, but once the service launches and evolves, the lifecycle may change, causing challenges to support operations later in the lifecycle.   

Even today, as SD-WAN services represent the low-hanging virtual service “fruit” for CSPs to target the B2B market with a more comprehensive and flexible service portfolio, this new service opportunity has created a need for a whole new dynamic orchestration process that embraces what Netcracker would consider a critical component of “evolved OSS” or “next-generation OSS.” 

The way to solve this problem is by investment in a new operations environment that brings together a unified strategy that ensures that SDN/NFV services can be supported by this next-generation OSS. For the CSP, this means the implementation of NFV orchestration, VNF managers, license management and control functions that are cloud native, real time, standards based and AI driven. 

Netcracker supports a model that is based on self-contained and sufficient domains, such as edge, transport and NFV that are autonomous, but still has an authority that sits above the domains to create a single cross-domain orchestration layer. This brings a new level of automation to the table, allows the ability to deliver services that cross multiple domains, scales based on customer needs, and works with any third-party partner to provide a comprehensive service offering.

Click here to listen to the presentation.