Nokia’s Digital Operations Center Empowers Intent-Based Service Lifecycle Automation at Scale
In the 5G era, it’s no longer possible to orchestrate and ensure services with traditional methods that are siloed and based on technology-focused tools and processes. To support digital services and network slicing cost-efficiently and at scale, operations support systems (OSS) need to evolve to unlock the value of a network across different domains, technologies, and vendors. A change from a technology focus to a business focus is required, and automation needs to be based on business intent and contracted SLAs.
Nokia’s acclaimed Digital Operations Center is an award-winning, modular solution featuring the Orchestration Center, Assurance Center, and a shared Unified Inventory. This dynamic combination provides a comprehensive platform for seamlessly managing the entire service lifecycle, encompassing digital services’ design, delivery, assurance, and 5G slicing with unparalleled scalability and speed.
Engineered for a fully automated, Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) driven closed-loop methodology, the Digital Operations Center boasts a sophisticated user interface for manual tasks. This design facilitates a phased approach, allowing for the gradual incorporation of automated processes as needed, including development, testing, acceptance, and usage.
The platform is adept at handling multi-vendor, multi-domain, and multi-technology environments, offering a fully cloud-native architecture suitable for any cloud deployment model. The Digital Operations Center aligns with industry standards such as TMF, ETSI, MEF, 3GPP, and IETF, ensuring a flexible and rapid integration process. This versatility positions it as a robust solution for intent-based service lifecycle automation at scale.
Business Advantages of the Nokia Digital Operations Center
Shorter Time to Resolution
Achieve a 30% increase in closed-loop ticket resolution.
Experience reduced errors and lower operational costs.
Faster Time to Market
Realize a 500-fold acceleration in service activation, promoting swift market entry.
Improved Efficiency
Enhance network utilization effectiveness by three times, leading to optimized resource utilization and operational efficiency.
The Digital Operations Center assumes a pivotal role with:
End-to-End Service Lifecycle Management
Overseeing the complete service lifecycle, including design, deployment, and assurance, to ensure compliance with contractual Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Abstraction of Network Complexity
Abstracting the intricacies of the underlying network to present its capabilities in an intent-based manner to commercial business support systems, simplifying interactions and enhancing communication.
Northbound Exposure
Offering northbound interfaces to commercial business support systems, enabling them to interact with the network based on intent, promoting a more intuitive and streamlined approach.
Southbound Interfaces and Oversight
Providing southbound interfaces and oversight to network layer systems, empowering them to support end-to-end service deployment and assurance effectively.
Closed Loop Integration
Closing the loop between traditionally isolated service orchestration and service assurance processes fostering increased efficiency and effectiveness in managing the entire service lifecycle.
Nokia Orchestration Center
The Nokia Orchestration Center delivers comprehensive end-to-end capabilities for network and service orchestration. This powerful platform empowers users to swiftly and efficiently design and deploy digital services and network slicing based on business intent. This leads to a substantial reduction in time-to-value for new services. The Orchestration Center integrates with the Assurance Center and the underlying Unified Inventory, facilitating round-trip closed-loop automated operations.
Nokia Assurance Center
The Assurance Center offers unified capabilities for network and service assurance across traditionally separated systems and domain silos. It enables proactive assurance of services in real-time, ensuring compliance with Service Level Agreements and driving down overall network and service costs. The Assurance Center contributes to round-trip closed-loop automated operations at scale when deployed alongside the Orchestration Center and the underlying Unified Inventory.
Unified Inventory
The Unified Inventory plays a vital role by providing discovery, reconciliation, and ongoing synchronization of network and service assets in near real-time. It is a foundational element for service orchestration and service assurance functions. When the Orchestration Center and Assurance Center are deployed in tandem, the Unified Inventory acts as a common data plane for both applications, enhancing data integrity and facilitating the adoption of network automation actions.
Sample Case Study | Communications Service Provider In Asia
A prominent Asian Communications Service Provider (CSP) intended to pioneer a 5G network slicing platform that could leverage emerging business models and foster new enterprise ecosystems. The Nokia Digital Operations Center emerged as the ideal solution, providing the CSP with a seamless means to pilot the platform swiftly and effortlessly while safeguarding the continuity of its existing service offerings. Through this trial initiative, the CSP successfully validated the substantial demand from enterprises for network services based on slicing. This strategic move positions the CSP to fully harness the advantages ushered in by the advent of 5G technology.
Challenges
With a longstanding reputation as a trailblazer in the mobile network arena, the CSP consistently embraced early adoption of technologies for the benefit of its customers, seeking a strategic first-mover advantage. Recognizing the potential of 5G slice-based network service offerings, the company viewed them as an ideal testing ground to explore the differentiation possibilities inherent in 5G technology and to tap into emerging enterprise opportunities.
Understanding that transitioning to 5G and embracing slice-based digital services necessitated significant changes to its Operations Support Systems (OSS), the CSP aimed to deliver these new services in a flexible, order-on-demand fashion. This approach aimed to fully leverage the advantages of its multi-domain, multi-vendor network infrastructure.
Additionally, the CSP sought an efficient method to trial its planned Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform, ensuring a thorough assessment of demand and potential among enterprises in its market before committing to full-scale deployment.
Solutions
The CSP is constructing a robust platform that harnesses the capabilities of the Nokia Digital Operations Center and CloudBand Network Director. The Digital Operations Center is a unified platform seamlessly integrating service orchestration and assurance. Positioned atop a shared software foundation, it can be deployed across any cloud environment.
This innovative platform employs closed-loop automation and end-to-end, intelligent orchestration. It streamlines the design, delivery, and assurance of slice-based network services, drastically reducing the provisioning time to mere minutes. This starkly contrasts the weeks or months it would traditionally take when set up manually. In essence, this integrated solution enhances efficiency, agility, and responsiveness in delivering cutting-edge digital services in the era of 5G.
Leveraging Nokia’s Digital Operations Center, the CSP can quickly and easily assess its collaborative capabilities in designing and deploying slice-based network services with its customers. This collaborative approach allows them to tailor services to meet each enterprise’s requirements, encompassing parameters such as speed, coverage area, reliability, latency, and security. The Digital Operations Center facilitates testing and validation of these services, ensuring they align precisely with the unique needs of diverse enterprises.
Adopting network slicing also unlocks innovative business models – such as B2B2X – empowering CSP enterprise customers to integrate their industry-specific capabilities with 5G services. This collaboration results in the creation of distinctive offerings tailored to their own end customers. The Digital Operations Center grants the CSP full control and visibility into its slice-based network services, ensuring stringent service-level agreements across various enterprise use cases. These use cases span diverse sectors, including logistics, smart factories, fleet management, immersive entertainment, and gaming.
Nokia’s solution is entirely vendor- and use case-agnostic, allowing for deploying slice-based services at scale within the CSP’s complex multi-vendor, multi-domain, and multi-technology environments. This flexibility ensures seamless integration and scalability, positioning the CSP to cater to a broad spectrum of enterprise needs efficiently and precisely.
Results
By leveraging 5G slices through its NaaS platform, the CSP aims to expand its customer base cost-effectively, concurrently assisting enterprise partners in addressing the specific needs of their clientele. This strategic move supports diverse use cases with highly specific network requirements, such as virtual reality, Internet of Things (IoT), and smart factory applications.
The CSP anticipates a swifter time to value for its new digital services and expects to realize enhanced network efficiency and reduced operating costs. Simultaneously, the Nokia Digital Operations Center supports the CSP’s existing services, including Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Software-Defined Wide-Area Networks (SD-WAN). This versatility signifies that the service provider can seamlessly manage both existing and new services from a unified platform, showcasing the adaptability and efficiency of its digital operations infrastructure.
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