SD-WAN Services Succeed When Customers Have Freedom of Choice
Multivendor environments that focus on a standards-based delivery approach will help guarantee service quality and a positive customer experience.
The first SD-WAN managed services from CSPs typically centered on a single vendor solution for the SD-WAN controller and CPE devices. Commercial offers were built from the feature set the particular vendor supported. Today, the market reality has evolved to where every CSP has moved or plans to move to a multivendor SD WAN environment. Whether it’s to increase their chances of winning an enterprise contract due to vendor preferences, or to address different feature sets for different markets, being able to give customers the ability to customize services efficiently and successfully is a market necessity.
In any competitive market, service flexibility is clearly one of the biggest differentiators. However, that flexibility cannot come at the expense of high quality. This is the case for both physical and virtual services, and as virtual services continue to ramp up in terms of availability and significance, reducing risk in delivery should be of paramount importance. Any CSP wishing to launch SD-WAN services must address the challenges of distribution and maintenance. This requires an effective establishment of distribution channels, customer premise hardware testing, and of course appropriate OSS and BSS capabilities to ensure everything works and services can be monetized.
Since giving customer the freedom to customize their service needs is what will drive the next level of innovation in SD-WAN, a multi-vendor approach should not increase the risk of operational issues. This starts with an online marketplace that helps automate and maximize operations efficiency at the early stages of the service lifecycle. A standards-based approach is what will facilitate and accelerate the adoption of multivendor SD-WAN and value-added services through automated operations and a new digital user experience.
MEF19 Proof of Concept Showcase
At this year’s MEF19 conference in Los Angeles, NEC and Netcracker, along with ADVA, Spirent, NTT Communications, Silver Peak and Versa have come together to demonstrate a Proof of Concept (PoC) that helps to allay fears around the SD-WAN service lifecycle and highlights service flexibility. In this PoC, Orchestrated Virtualized Multivendor SD-WAN Services, CSPs will see how they can increase their ability to differentiate themselves in the highly competitive SD-WAN market by offering their customers maximum freedom in choosing SD-WAN solutions anywhere in the world. Powered by a unified marketplace, self-service portal and NFV-based uCPE platform, MEF 70 compliant SD-WAN services from different vendors can be selected independently of the CPE hardware and seamlessly deployed with little to no intervention from the service provider or end user. Through this new digital user experience, SD-WAN services are orchestrated, activated, assured and managed using zero-touch provisioning and end-to-end service automation in alignment with MEF’s LSO framework.
In advance of the conference, download our whitepaper for an overview of the PoC, vendor responsibilities, overview of the architecture and responsibilities of each component throughout the service delivery process flow.