Operational automation
TIME dotcom (TIME)Business challenge / opportunity
TIME dotcom (TIME) offers some of the fastest internet connectitivty to residential and business customers in Asia. It is expanding its fibre network and value added solutions to the wholesale, enterprise, SME, and consumer markets. The company is growing rapidly in terms of number of customers and expanding internationally. Its overall revenue across offerings such as data and datacenter is growing more than 18% per year. Continuing this growth and at the same time adopting new technologies and lowering costs are some of the challenges TIME is facing.
TIME has identified that staying competitive by adopting new technologies is of critical importance. Significant investments are made in new technologies that can improve and increase efficiency in their operations. The automation of their operational processes is top of their agenda.
Challenges include:
- Increasing competition in the telecommunication market are driving down prices of fixed internet services.
- Growing customer expectations in terms of quality, speed and reliability of services puts heavy pressure on innovation and adopting new technologies to be able to deliver these services.
- Expansion in new markets increases the complexity of operations.
Reliance on outdated manual operational processes that are a bottleneck in adopting and managing new technologies.
Towards 100% operational Automation
TIME’s strategy is centred around the introduction of new technologies such as NFV and automation and the simplification of operations. The goal is to reduce CAPEX and OPEX by being able to deliver more services more efficiently.
Several major drivers were identified as key to this strategy:
1. End-to-end orchestration of new cloud based services
The aim is to be able to simplify and automate the orchestration of the Cloud-based connectivity and value added services. These new services are made up of various pieces of legacy and Cloud technologies. In order to be able to easily design, deploy and manage these services, an end-to-end orchestration solution is required. New tools are required to be able to dynamically manage services that are in production without the need for extensive manual effort.
2. Towards 100% operational automation
One of the key drivers to be able to deliver services faster and more efficiently is to move towards full operational automation. The current manual and workflow based tools should be replaced by automated processes. The design and testing of new services to be automated so that they can be deployed quickly. More importantly, once these services are in production, full operational automation should allow the service provider to upgrade an existing service to a new service or heal or scale a service without any manual intervention.
The operational automation is expected to deliver a reduction in manual effort of more than 80% compared to the current way of working.
3. Deliver dynamic connectivity and value added services
The service provider is planning to launch innovative new connectivity and valued added services based on Cloud technologies. Value added services such as security on top of the basic connectivity service should be delivered in minutes from ordering. The services consist of traditional and Cloud-based building blocks which should cater for dynamic change as the customer requires.
The Business Case
More than 90% reduction in manual effort of designing, deploying, and managing new services
98% reduction in service provisioning time
0% increase in OPEX while being able to increase the number of new services
Accanto’s Stratoss at the heart of the operational automation
Stratoss
Accanto’s flaghip Stratoss product sits at the heart of TIME’s strategy. After a competitive procurement process, including a proof-of-concept, Stratoss was selected for the following reasons:
- The only solution that could address the service provider’s goal of 100% operational automation.
- Full automation for day 0, 1, and 2 operational use cases removing the need for extensive manual effort and costs.
- Simplified design and test tools allows them to rapidly launch, update, and upgrade new services.
- Integrated DevOps enables the service provider to create a service factory that allows them to continuously design and deliver new services at a much lower cost.
- Multi-vendor and end-to-end orchestration of hybrid cloud and traditional infastructure as proven in the POC.
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.
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Headquartered in Finland and operating globally, Accanto provides software to help customers simplify and automate the production of cloud networking services. In providing tools that unify engineering and operations, we decrease the time and resource required to design, test, and simplify the production-to-live process, leading to smarter operations. Accanto designs-in operational lifecycle best practice to operate, predict and automate carrier and enterprise grade networks and applications.
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