Open Hybrid Network Cloud transformation

Tier 1 Indian Operator

Business challenge / opportunity

This operator is one of the largest in the world, and has grown significantly over the last 10 years, both organically and through mergers with competition. It faces a number of major challenges as well as a strategic objective to transform both the company and its IT/network estate to meet the needs of technologies such as 5G.

The operator’s executive has determined the company needs to reduce costs by $9 billion in 3 years whilst maintaining and further improving the service provided to its customers in order to provide the foundation to compete and succeed in this high-growth market.

The operator sees a huge 5G opportunity both in terms of market share and also as an enabler for IoT, enterprise productivity and consumer data, given the limited fixed broadband or alternative availability. This requires a strategic transformation of both IT and Network, in order to move to the cloud taking advantage of virtualization in order to streamline and, to automate both engineering and operations.

Challenges include:

  • The national market is undergoing severe price competition initiated by a major competitor, requiring both a commercial response and a multi-billion reduction in OPEX in order to respond and compete.
  • As this operator has merged with a national competitor, the Data Centres and networks are a complex and legacy mix of technologies, architectures and vendors.
  • Design, launch and operation of services/networks is over 75% manual and based on custom workflow, resulting in enormous people costs, high error levels and slow time to launch and heal.
  • The demand in the national market for individuals with the relevant skills far exceeds supply, which is further complicated by the number of vendor software and hardware stacks.

Towards 100% operational Automation

1. End-to-end Orchestrate the entire end to end Telco Cloud Infrastructure

This project provides a single consistent Commodity Cloud Stack for Operator Network Workload, replacing the complex legacy data centres and network stacks. This project is targeted to complete nationwide within 12 months and provides the foundation for the Open Hybrid Cloud Network.  

End-to-end orchestration and management requires a single orchestration solution to manage all tasks from Lab (Day 0) to Operations (Day 2) as well as a service design from IT to infrastructure.

2. Adopt Brutal Automation strategy

The operator has adopted a bold strategy to move away from customized/manual workflow across individual IT and network levels to an intent-based ‘productized’ model where design is consistently designed once, and then imposed on the Telco Cloud roll-out and operations.

This strategy enables the operator to increase automation from 25% to over 70% within 10 months, resulting in transformed costs and also time to launch/heal services. In addition, the operator plans to leverage AI capabilities for the “final 30%” in order to maximise automation

1. 3. Deploy vEPC, disaggregate NEP Stack

Multiple and closed NEP Vendor stacks act as a major cost and barrier to innovation. By deploying Network Workload on Generic Cloud and vEPC with a NEP neutral VIM and Orchestrator, the operator is able to dramatically reduce dependency on NEP-specific software and infrastructure.

The Business Case

50-70% Time to Revenue improvement
30-40% OPEX Reduction
30-40% CAPEX Reduction
2% additional revenue achieved through new innovative cloud services enabled via the transformation

The Stratoss Lifecycle Manager

Stratoss™ Lifecycle Manager

Accanto’s flaghip Stratoss™ Lifecycle Manager product sits at the heart of service provider strategy. It is the core end-to-end orchestration platform which directs transformation from the legacy networks/data centres to the Open Hybrid Cloud Network.

    Stratoss Lifecycle Manager enables true end-to-end cloud orchestration in a single platform

    • Day 0 to Day 2 (Lab to Operations)
    • Service to IT to Infrastructure

    Cloud Native

    This unique cloud native product has been built from scratch over the last 3 years to meet the most complex requirements, based on radical design principles:

    • Opinionated Model; the product is architected around a product philosophy, where all service design configuration is standardized once and then utilized repeatedly across the IT/network landscape.
    • Brutal automation; rather than the legacy custom workflow by layer approach, the product ‘imposes’ the design based on the opinionated model .
    • Service-centric Intent; the design is centered around intent-based design and operations. Whereas other products enable network intent, often only on Day 1 launch, the product provides end-to-end Service-centric Intent from lab to operations.
    • NEP-neutrality; the product is designed to reduce NEP-dependency by providing consistent NEP-neutral configurations.
    • DevOps; Vendor-agnostic DevOps and CI/CD processes for new services and change management.

    About Accanto

    Accanto’s Stratoss™ is a cloud networking automation platform that embraces the I.T DevOps movement. Stratoss enables complex network services to be designed, created and continuously optimised across hybrid and distributed cloud environments. Stratoss’s unique intent engine delivers dramatic “lights out” operational automation, lowering the cost of managing edge cloud fabrics for Enterprise and 5G, and increasing the pace of innovation.

    Accanto is headquartered in Finland and operates globally.