Enterprise automation and orchestration: what’s the holdup? – Ericsson

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are losing billions in potential revenue as the adoption of cost-cutting automation and orchestration technologies continues to stall. A recent study involving 150 CSPs found that the telecom industry has let up to USD 30 billion slide as a result of poor automation and orchestration.

Yet CSPs clearly recognize the importance of automation and service orchestration in improving profitability, among other benefits. Considerable efforts are currently underway to realize the opportunities these technologies present and overcome innate challenges.

The latest TM Forum report, Enterprise Orchestration Service: Building the Bridge, reviews the role of open APIs and catalogs in orchestration and explores how CSPs are working to overcome the obstacles theyre facing in orchestrating enterprise services.

Here, we outline the key insights from the report.

Open application program interfaces (APIs) and catalogs are key components in the network architecture required to fully unlock the power of 5G and support end-to- end dynamic orchestration.

TM Forum is creating a framework, known as the Open Digital Architecture (ODA), which is envisioned as a more agile replacement for traditional operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) architecture. Its goal is to set a new vision for OSS/BSS, and a de facto standard for the design of open digital platforms.

One key attribute of the ODA (and other open architectures) is that it enables CSPs to create products dynamically, without having to write specific code, thereby reducing costs and time to market. To achieve this, the central product catalog needs to be the storehouse of all relevant data related to products, services and resources and the focal point for monetizing new technical capabilities that are being deployed into the network.

As Ludovic Robert, IT Senior Architect at Orange, explains in the report: The commercial catalog is the cornerstone to reduce time to market because it enables data-driven order capture and order delivery processes.

Many CSPs current core architecture relies on commercial software applications that have been further developed inhouse, and they often have overlapping functionality or gaps in the end-to-end customer journey. By moving towards an architecture based on open APIs, operators can address these inconsistencies and dramatically reduce the time it takes to deploy new product offers.

The benefits of orchestrating enterprise services using open APIs and centralized catalogs are clear, but in the report, three primary obstacles for operators were highlighted:

However, optimistic outlooks are also shared in the report, with senior CSP stakeholders forecasting that as 5G technology matures, well see increased levels of automation.

Although the telecom industry is yet to fully embrace centralized catalogs and open APIs on a wide scale, there are clear steps that can be taken toward increasing automation and orchestration, and some CSPs are already on their way. Heres some of what theyre doing:

Download a copy of the Enterprise Orchestration report for the full findings, insights and case studies.

Read more about network automation

Read more about the TM forums Open Digital Framework

Learn about the top three benefits of service orchestration

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Enterprise automation and orchestration: what's the holdup? - Ericsson