5G Introduction
Mobility Evolution
The mobile network has changed everyone’s day to day life. Living in today’s connected world is a a 40+ year journey. Mobility has become pervasive allowing the possibility of being connected to everyone and everything in our lives. The mobile phone has become an instrument for information, work, education, healthcare, financials, e-commerce and so much more. The introduction of 5G has paved the path to enabling CSPs (communication Service Providers) the capability of offering Network as a Service (NaaS) to countless Enterprise industries as a Managed Service that can be offered through Network Slicing or through a Private 5G offering.
CSPa are enabling this next generation of mobility by extending their network into the enterprise edge by creating the concept of providing a Network as a Business Platform. 5G brings about the need for Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) so that enterprise verticals (health, finance, utilities, etc) can take advantage of the promises that 5G has to offer. As more and more enterprise industries adopt 5G, more and more Private 5G Networks are needed not only to satisfy the data privacy needs by all enterprise but to be able to accommodate Enterprise Edge Solutions or Use Cases. 5G is also accelerating the need for CSPs to provide Managed Service Provider (MSP) solutions to enterprise customers who lack the talent and capacity to manage an entire mobile network. As the numbers of connected devices keeps increasing, the bandwidth needs keep growing and latency requirements keep shrinking to ensure near-real time experience for customer, it becomes clear that automation is what is underpinning the growth and acceleration in the 5G industry.
Automation is essential in bringing 5G to the next level of innovation, where enterprises can create incredible use cases transforming our day to day lives. Automation is needed to solve the complexity that 5G also brings with having a disaggregated, multi cloud, multi vendor and multi tenant environment.
Figure 1: The evolution of mobility where 5G has enabled the offering of a mobile network as a business platform.
Infrastructure , Experience, New Services
The race for 5G has been in play for several years, all CSPs want to bring new services and applications to market faster. CSPs are required to have target market clarity to ensure early adoption and ensuring that automation is top of mind. A few business imperatives that need to be consider are described below.
Business First: First and foremost, future development will be dependent on a more in-depth grasp of business imperatives, risks, and desired results Operators will need to better understand their customers’ verticals, business goals, and difficulties, which will need the development of functionally rich capabilities to create solutions that can meet those imperatives. To that end, AI and intelligence management will be critical in discovering the value and generating actionable insights.
Ecosystems and Enablement: Moving forward, dynamic ecosystems will be at the center of every service provider’s 5G, B2B, and enterprise strategies. To achieve development, service providers must interact, and ecosystems play a critical role in linking businesses, customers, and even rivals to generate new value. CSPs will meet the demands of both local and global organizations, where orchestration and harmonization of internal and third-party skills and assets will be critical.
Scale, Standards, and Agility: As 5G mobile networks and cloud capabilities collide, and success advances beyond aggregation to orchestration, multi-edge computing (MEC) has become important. To achieve the scale and super-low latencies necessary to enable future autonomous use cases, data will need to be handled at the network’s edge. As a result, a cloud-first strategy based on shared standards and open APIs will be vital to any 5G plan. This includes business partners, vendors, and ecosystem contributors in addition to service providers.
Trust and Transparency: Develop the right partnerships. Operators will need to develop multiple partnerships with content developers to monetize the 5G-enabled experiences that appeal to smaller segments of consumers. They will need to carefully consider which content providers to partner with, create provider-friendly platforms, and determine whether to bill customers directly or leverage content providers’ strong brands and relationships.
Figure 2: Design, deploying and managing 5G services all reply on bringing 5G services to market faster on a single platform.
5G, B2B, and dynamic ecosystems will underlie and define the telecoms sector over the next decade, with edge, cloud-first, scalable architectures serving as enabling tools.
Digital Transformation Journey
CSPs are continuously undergoing a digital transformation. But the transformation that’s happening in their business is much broader than just the rollout and activation of 5G spectrum.
CSPs are continuously undergoing a digital transformation as they migrate to 5G. In preparing for 5G and edge computing deployments, service providers need to redesign their mobile network and IT architectures from the ground up—moving away from monolithic, appliance- based network architectures and leveraging horizontal IT architectures.
Cloud computing resources can now be deployed in distributed data centers at the edge of the network, which provides a platform for modern applications and services. This has led service providers on a critical journey to implement a cloud-native infrastructure while transitioning their existing network to a hybrid, multi-cloud and distributed network that is designed for agility. This provides a platform for modern applications and services designed to meet the demands and needs of the enterprise industry. The caveat is that these edge cloud services need to be run at tremendous scale.
With this transformation, the core domains of the telco network – the core-network, the transport, the radio access network and the edge network – are designed to be seamlessly managed and continuously optimized. But is this reflected in reality? Are today’s networks able to visualize, to predict, sense and respond to changes in real time?
CSPs are undergoing massive transformation initiatives in order to provide unparalleled quality of experience, reduced OPEX as automation comes into play and brings about Innovation from not just enterprise but from startups and academia and all this leads to providing a platform to their customers. With ServiceNow, CSPs are cable of managing the entire closed loop automation lifecycle management.
Figure 3: The digital transformation journey that CSPs are undertaking as part of their migration to 5G deployments.
With the convergence of IT and telco cloud we now have the telco cloud expanding into the enterprise edge. Therefore, the combination of 5G, edge computing and hybrid multi-cloud represents a new computing model capable of transforming a wide range of industries.
Figure 4: Creating Differentiated Business Services with the convergence of Telco and IT: Driving Innovation by Maximizing the best of both worlds.
As a service providers’ business continues to grow – it becomes more critical to deliver on the digital transformation goals. Digital transformation is challenging and the root cause for a lot of these challenges is consistency. This inconsistency stems from having disconnected systems, lack of visibility, and siloed reactive processes.
The Total Telecom Experience
CSPs need to monetize their investments by not only having the visibility of their current assets across technologies and vendors, but also to be able to improve performance, efficiencies and support new services.
Today’s use cases are customized solution offerings driving innovation while delivering on business insights. CSPs need to simplify their networks as they continue to scale making Network Inventory a critical building block in optimizing network resources.
How do you maintain proper lifecycle management in a multi-vendor, multi-tenant network without affecting end-user QoE? It is also extremely difficult to maintain visibility into your network without a common toolset to manage, monitor and maintain the entire end-to-end network.
Visibility, Simplicity, Assurance and Scale are not only needed for the networks of today but to drive innovation for the networks of tomorrow. CSPs today are building an Innovation Ecosystem where new applications, new business models and innovations are harnessing the power of 5G to ensure seamless transition between the IT and Telco Cloud.
Figure 5: Exploring how CSPs can harness the capability of the Telecom Ecosystem
ServiceNow: Providing a Single 5G Platform Solution
CSPs are transforming the way they operate by streamlining task assignments, providing data visibility across organizations, eliminating costly and error-prone integrations, and enabling technical teams to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions.
The key is to have reliable data, without a reliable source of truth it becomes almost impossible to provide the visibility and service assurance needed to meet the stringent customer SLAs. Both customer service agents and network operators need to access consistent, relevant, and updated network data. The key is to have a single platform. With both organizations working on the same platform, visibility to relevant data and execution of cross organizational processes becomes seamless.
Money typically spent on costly deployment and maintenance to integrate systems can instead be spent on streamlining operations to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Relying on a single source of truth for Product, Service, and Resource data makes attending to customer requests and issues no longer a time-consuming multi-system process. ServiceNow is the single platform that bonds all service and operational components in a 5G network by providing the automation needed in a network from planning and building, to designing and building and finally to operating and maintenance.
Figure 6: ServiceNow Provides end-to-end Lifecycle Automation as part of the Total Telecom Experience
Stay Tuned to the second blog installment.
