When looking at Operators' pain point around Inventory, the following issues are prevalent:
- Missing unified view for Inventory management.
- Low data accuracy of the inventory systems (no on-going discovery). The data quality is too low for assurance and fulfillment tasks to rely on.
- Lack of Unified Access inventory information and low data quality causing long time in Assurance Root Cause Analysis process support which causes:
- Longer Customer down time
- Reduction in Customer satisfaction
- Churn growth
- Multiple inventory systems – need these systems to retire and replaces with a Unified Inventory.
- Lack of support for Network Serviceability (due to inaccurate inventory data)
- Long provisioning duration for Enterprise services (due to inaccurate inventory data)
One important and uncomfortable truth is that on average, 35 percent of service provider network assets are stranded, and numbers as high as 50 percent are not uncommon.
So what is Network Discovery and how can it help?
Network Discovery is a Real-time on-going process by which physical, logical, virtual networks and services data is discovered and reconciled into the main Inventory system, to make sure that its data is always 100% accurate, so that planning, fulfilment and assurance OSS processes can work correctly, efficiently and effectively.
In more formal terms:
Business problem – Inaccurate inventory impacts planning, assurance and fulfilment processes. Inaccurate inventory may cause order fallout, wrong planning decisions and misidentified network issues.
Solution – Data Integrity Assurance, using Discovery and Reconciliation processes, ensures an accurate Inventory of the network and services that enables effective business decision making.
And really, when we look at the problem, it is clear that Visibility is at the foundation of technology and network management excellence:
Without Visibility, there's only so much you can get at real automation. For example, if we look at the self-healing maturity curve shown in the figure below, it is not that none of the operations described there are impossible to achieve without proper visibility and accurate data, but there is an invisible barrier there, somewhere between Level 2 and Level 3, which is unsurmountable unless you have proper and reliable data on which the higher level automated and autonomous function can act upon:
Now we can take a look at the key requirements for Network Discovery:
- First and foremost, we should use Federated Network Discovery, meaning we should be able to rely on multiple sources - Federated discovery is a service discovery mechanism that incorporates two or more different service advertisement mechanisms. (see formal definition at: https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/secure-service-discovery/10994)
- In today's world, our Network Discovery process should be able to handle discovery of physical, virtual and logical network data,
- Network Discovery should be able to Collect raw data from external NMS systems or directly from NEs.
- Network Discovery should be able to Transform the raw data collected to a target data model in the CMDB.
- Network Discovery is not a one-off effort, it should run continuously (in either scheduled, on-demand and event-based manners) in order to prevent CI Drift (where the formerly accurate inventory data becomes more and more distant from actual network state, bringing us back to the original problem)
- Network Discovery should run together with Data synchronization, discrepancy analysis and reconciliation workflows, as we do not want to simply override whatever's in the inventory, but be able to detect discrepanices between stored inventory data and network data and in some occasions manage the reconciliation between these using automated or semi-automated workflows.
Let's look at how this solves for our original problem:
How does all this relates to ServiceNow Telecom Offering? Well, I'm glad you've asked (though in truth, it was me who asked, but I hope I'm channeling the inner voice of those reading this :)).
ServiceNow has recently announced the acquisition of Atrinet NetACE network technology to accelerate business transformation for telcos (https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/servicenow-to-acquire-atrinet.html) and the first fruits of this acquisition will come in the form of support for Telecom Network Discovery as part of ServiceNow Telecom Solutions, under Telecom Service Operations Management:
This is going to become first available at ServiceNow Yokohoma release, at Q1 2025, and we are all very excited about this. If you are too, and have any questions, you are more than welcome to reach me out so we can further discuss, and in addition, if you are a ServiceNow customer interested in this, we welcome you to consider becoming a design partner for the Telecom Network Discovery roadmap!
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