Category: Insights

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Unleashing high-speed Fiber connectivity

Accelerate Fiber connectivity and reliability with enhanced network orchestration and assurance solutions

The demand for faster and reliable connectivity in the digital era has led to the rise of Fiber optics, transforming our digital experiences. Gartner‘s recent report highlights a growing preference for gigabit Fiber to The Home (FTTH) services among consumers, emphasizing the importance of modern connectivity. By 2025, approximately 60% of Tier-1 service providers are expected to adopt the 10 Gigabit Symmetrical-PON (XGS-PON) technology. Despite this growth, Fiber broadband encounters obstacles like slow setup, connectivity issues, and network fragmentation from diverse technologies. McKinsey notes that 40% of potential users’ decisions and churn rates are influenced by Fiber network experiences.

To address the challenges, service providers need to transition towards automation and data-driven decision-making in network management. This shift facilitates efficient deployment, operation, and maintenance of networks, while also providing valuable performance insights. Achieving this requires the adoption of right technology enablers, allowing for zero-touch provisioning, nearly zero-touch operations, and comprehensive network insights to expedite service setup.

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Fig : Essential enablers for network transformation success

The fiber network’s lifecycle involves various phases, from planning and design to orchestration and assurance. This insight examines essential enablers for effective orchestration, assurance, and visualization. Through these enablers, service providers can expedite service setup up to 60%, advancing their path towards “Fiber for the Future.”


To succeed, service providers must prioritize zero-touch provisioning, near-zero touch operations, and comprehensive network insights for a faster service setup

    Authors:
  • Dibyendu Dey, Principal Architect
  • Rohit Karthikeyan, Manager – Strategic Insights
Categories
Cloud

Maximize value from cloud migration

Migrate complex online charging systems and network service order management to the cloud holistically.

Service providers across the globe are either considering or have already increased their spending on Cloud. Gartner states, “Cloud will be the centerpiece of new digital services and experiences, which is why 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in the cloud over the next few years”. As Online Charging Systems (OCS) and network Service Order Management (SOM) are at the forefront, moving them to the cloud renders the advantage of coping with the evolving 5G landscape and virtualization. However, service providers are still reluctant to make this transition because:

  • Handling heavy payloads and workflows while juggling through an integration-heavy architecture with zero latency is cumbersome
  • Securing sensitive data such as invoices, Call Detail Records (CDRs), history of customers’ usage, financial transactions, and porting information is critical
  • Adhering to complex data compliance requirements for local and national data regulatory norms

In addition, unlike other CRM systems, the transition of OCS and network SOM to the cloud involves significant challenges due to the complex networks and integrations in the telco architecture. These are critical systems that go through numerous changes every day, and they can’t afford delays. Hence successful cloud migration requires a robust deployment architecture, end-to-end automation, and continuous security to quickly adapt to real-time changes in the environment and accelerate secure releases.

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Fig: Key focus areas for successful cloudification of OCS and network SOM


Moving OCS and network SOM to the cloud offers phenomenal advantage with the evolving 5G landscape and virtualization. However, service providers are still reluctant to make this transition.

Categories
Salesforce

Transform customer experience with unified order management

Reach new levels of customer centricity with Salesforce

An Order Management System (OMS) is the backbone of the ordering and fulfillment process. A unified OMS is crucial for delivering exceptional Customer Experience (CX) – it is the deciding factor between customers’ loyalty or their willingness to switch to a competitor. A unified OMS can strengthen revenue streams, and reduce expenses, leading to improved business performance.

According to Forrester, 90% of customers believe their experience during the order journey is as significant as the product or service itself. However, a traditional OMS faces significant challenges, such as relying on manual processes, generic order journeys, duplicate leads, and inflexible systems, which negatively impact CX.

Service providers must use a unified order management system to overcome these obstacles. Salesforce OMS, a single platform that facilitates integration with various systems and data sources, delivers a comprehensive view of the customer and their orders across all channels. Although the Salesforce OMS platform is extremely powerful, service providers must take the right implementation approach to achieve maximum benefits.

Salesforce OMS for CX transformation: A strategic implementation approach

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To deliver a consistent CX, service providers must employ a holistic and customer-centric implementation approach that encompasses the entire order journey, viewed through three different lenses:

  • Lens 1: Examine primary shortcomings during order capturing and address issues
  • Lens 2: Investigate major inefficiencies in the order orchestration stage and resolve issues
  • Lens 3: Analyze, identify, and resolve gaps in customer service stage and deliver exceptional CX through automation

The recommended implementation approach effectively addresses challenges and reduces OMS implementation time by up to 40%, accelerating order journey towards a modernized system and enhancing CX.


Salesforce OMS offers a unified platform that can integrate with various systems and data sources, providing a comprehensive view of the customer and their orders across all channels.

Categories
Product Engineering

Unlock the power of AI to net visual bugs

Accelerate visual testing using AI and achieve better accuracy at lower operational costs

According to Browser stack, 67% of businesses conduct visual testing manually to detect and fix visual bugs.

However, manual testing to detect visual bugs has posed several challenges that affect productivity, such as:

  • Testing multiple aspects – Every single component in a UI requires thorough testing
  • Frequent UI changes lead to a redundant and prolonged testing process
  • Inconsistency in UI across platforms – Different UIs across different digital channels, such as browsers (both mobile and web versions), mobile apps, and operating systems (Android & IOS), make it difficult to conduct thorough testing

To overcome the aforementioned challenges, service providers must use AI to automate the process of visual testing to detect bugs quickly and efficiently, improve accuracy and reduce operational costs.

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Fig: AI-driven test automation for visual testing


Implementing AI-driven test automation can accelerate testing with better accuracy, enhanced test coverage, and lower operational costs.

Categories
Media & Entertainment

Delivering captivating entertainment experiences

How connected platforms and streaming firms can consistently deliver great CX across complex content delivery networks and ensure the highest levels of quality of experience (QoE)

As the streaming wars intensify, delivering an exceptional customer experience becomes a key differentiator in gaining and retaining subscribers. It’s not just about the content anymore, viewers want a high-quality, engaging, and enriching experience that caters to their needs and desires.

Delivering a brilliant customer experience (CX) and helping digital companies navigate the complex content consumption and delivery ecosystem is critical. Digital companies must contend with multiple variables and validate engineering and customer views of QoE KPIs to ensure optimal experiences.

Major challenges in assuring delightful customer experiences include:

  • Siloed data platforms – A central data hare that collects and correlates data for predictive insights from multiple sources is critical.
  • Lack of continuous monitoring – Implementing a continuous monitoring mechanism for all the critical CX impacting backend video services (100s of microservices) can be difficult
  • Issues with performance tracking – Measuring and monitoring audio/video performance KPIs (such as MOS, re-buffering, slow start-up time, etc.) can be complex


Customer Experience Assurance (CXA) framework continuously enhances engineering and customers’ view of QoE – positioning the company for continued leadership.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Design digitization for faster fibre deployment

Put your Fibre on the Fast Lane with the Fibre Design Framework (FDF) and get deliverables right the first time

As per Research & Market, the global Fibre-to-the-Home/Building (FTTH/B) market is projected to reach US$29.7 B by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 13.1%. Considering such enormous growth and demand for fibre, efficient and commercially viable fibre planning and design is becoming incredibly important.

However, fibre operators face several challenges in Plan and Design phase that lead to budget overruns, missed deadlines, and loss of competitive edge. Here are some challenges:

  • Skill shortage: Slows down the fibre rollout
  • Manual work: Takes longer duration due to multiple hand-offs and paperwork in the High-level Design (HLD) and Low-level Design (LLD) stages
  • Unstandardized designs: Leads to quality/consistency issues in templates and documents
  • Unstructured work culture: Generates incorrect/missed field inputs

To overcome these challenges, fibre operators must consider ways to automate the key fibre design processes. The Fibre Design Framework (FDF) discussed in this Insight can bring high levels of automation in the fibre design process, and accelerate rollout time by 2X. The framework encompasses key components such as –

  • Automated HLD generator: Create an automated high-level design with defined design standards and parameters
  • Task Collaborator: Manage workflows digitally, collaborating tasks across multiple teams, and systems
  • Field Navigator: Capture video-enabled field inputs across existing and planned design network elements
  • Quality Gateways: Integrate quality management gates at crucial junctures


Fibre planning and design has become critical to achieve rollout targets, amid strong growth posted by the
Fibre-to-the Home/Building market estimated at 13.1% this year.

Categories
Product Engineering

Create product differentiation and supercharge revenue growth

The key ingredients connected platforms and software products (CPS) firms must consider to stay ahead of the curve

Explore new opportunities enabled by emerging Cloud, Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Network technologies!

In an industry driven by constant change and innovations, connected platforms and software product (CPS) firms have created tremendous value. Its innovations fuel the digital world, connecting people, things, devices, and networks.

CPS firms need to overcome 4 significant challenges to maintain their competitive edge:

  • Improving the innovation speed – bringing innovative and differentiated products and features faster to the market. 
  • Analyzing large amounts of siloed data sets to understand customer preferences and behaviors, develop customer-centric products, and continually improve customer experience.
  • Increasing the efficiency of product development and engineering processes while keeping costs under control.
  • Gaining access to new markets, extending the reach, and accelerating revenue.

From this industry viewpoint, we share the key ingredients that can help Connected Platforms and Software (CPS) product firms to overcome the above challenges and create product differentiation.


Products on the cloud can scale much faster, reach global customers, and deliver a significantly higher quality of service at lower costs

Categories
IT Agility

Realizing the trustworthiness of AI systems

Implement AI reliability scorecard to accelerate trusted decision-making

Service providers in the Connectedness industry are increasingly relying on digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to remain competitive. However, AI requires a high level of trust because of questions surrounding its fairness, explainability, and security.  Ensuring trust is a priority, as lack of trust can be the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of AI.

AI implementations today lack mechanisms to arrive at fair and interpretable predictions, understand the working of complex ML models, and secure the model against adversarial attacks leading to the leakage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Also, it is found that most organizations are challenged in ensuring their AI is trustworthy and responsible, such as reducing bias, tracking performance variations and model drift, and making sure they can explain AI-powered decisions.

As the service providers struggle to address the risks arising from bias and privacy issues, implementing Responsible AI assists in recognizing, preparing, and mitigating the potential effects of AI. It also improves transparent communication, end-user trust, model auditability, and the productive use of AI.

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Fig: Responsible AI: The key to achieve a trustworthy AI system


As the service providers struggle to address the risks arising from bias and privacy issues, implementing Responsible AI helps prepare and mitigate the potential effects of AI

Categories
Operational Excellence

Making operational improvements stick

Embed a Value Driven Continuous Improvement (VDCI) function in your operations organization for superior customer experience and operational efficiency

There is fierce competition between fibre operators to acquire the top spot. And one way to remain competitive is to constantly improve or advance their operations while keeping costs in check and ensuring a seamless customer experience.

However, 60% of all corporate six sigma initiatives fail. Talking specifically about fibre operators, we observed that they still rely on traditional operations improvement activities performed on a one-time or on-demand basis translating to a limited-time benefit only. Also, these activities need to catch up with the fast-changing fibre environment.

As a result, fibre operators suffer from various challenges, like the inability to meet coverage targets on time, overshooting budget, and delays in service delivery. Despite a lean operating model, they fail to sustain continuous improvement, resulting in poor customer experience, huge investments, and unsustainable strategies

The need of the hour for fibre operators is a massive shift in their culture towards continuous improvement. They must embed a Value-Driven Continuous Improvement (VDCI) function into their organization’s structure to instill a culture of constant advancement, reduce OpEx and stay ahead of the competition. The critical stages of the VDCI function are Discovery, Formulation, Execution, and Evaluation.


Continuous improvement is an
ongoing effort, big or small, to improve all elements of an organization.
– McKinsey

Categories
Operational Excellence

Creating visibility and control for off-net services

Leverage process orchestration framework to achieve faster integration with partner service providers and improve operational efficiency

Businesses in the Connectedness industry are actively looking to expand their roots into the untapped fiber market. And to do so, most of them prefer to go with off-net services, i.e., leasing network infrastructure from a partner service provider. It enables quick and cost-efficient customer acquisition for establishing a larger footprint.

As per the annual report of a leading full fiber operator in the UK, off-net revenues account for 50% of their total revenue. Therefore, service providers must overcome the challenges that hinder them from supporting lean off-net operations and improving customer satisfaction.

Service providers in the off-net space face the following challenges:

  • Integration with multiple partner service providers is complex, time-consuming (18+ months for each integration), and expensive
  • Lack of visibility into the partner service provider’s network leading to disjointed operations
  • Lack of transparency across E2E process management, leading to multiple follow-ups
  • Increase in Tail order processing cycle time (i.e., order processing time by partner service provider)
  • Significant manual processes owing to the dependency on the partner service provider
  • Lack of standardized processes and a unified way of handling the orders/cases

The above challenges call for a complete transformation of the off-net services. Use the off-net process orchestration framework that acts as a central orchestrator to bridge the gap between service providers and partner service providers. It reduces operation costs by 56% while providing better control and visibility into E2E processes. Experience 3X faster integration with partner service providers using the framework.

The key ingredients of the framework are:

  • Simple interface aggregation: Use an interface aggregation platform to enable quick integration with the partner service provider and accelerate fiber adoption
  • Unified task orchestration: Create an end-to-end process flow map to get a complete view of the order and issue status
  • Point-to-point ticketing: Integrate customer self-service with automated troubleshooting. Use bots to raise tickets directly with the partner service providers
  • Off-net SLA governance and reporting: Drive partner service provider-specific SLAs with automated follow-ups and real-time reports on aging and penalty metrics


An end-to-end off-net service strategy is vital for supporting lean operations and improving customer experience.