Enterprise Connectivity

Enterprise IT has experienced significant digital transformation during recent years as applications are increasingly moved from internally managed deployments to cloud based solutions. These can be based on a private cloud, residing on premise, public clouds accessed through public networks, or a hybrid cloud environment, being a combination of both.

At the same time, enterprise connectivity remains a fragmented and complex environment where one size will not fit all. DAS (distributed antenna systems), small cells, SD-WAN, carrier wifi and repeaters all play a major part in providing enterprise services, especially as operators compete to retain high value clients with legacy enterprise networks.

Mobile operators are well placed to take advantage of these needs in order to become a wireless connectivity provider for the enterprise, with new technologies like 5G and edge clouds emerging and opening new ways to distribute applications and optimize the usage of infrastructure, as well as providing increased security and dynamic network management capabilities.

Operators selling their connectivity and cloud computing services to enterprises face new challenges, including:

In order to remain competitive in this new world, a radical approach to service orchestration is required. The traditional model and workflow-based tools that rely on manual effort to design, test, and maintain these services does not enable commercially viable services. Instead, new processes and tools enabling holistic end-to-end service modelling and operational automation are required.

Several major drivers can be identified as key to building a successful service orchestration solution and to remain competitive in the continuously changing landscape:

Stratoss

Accanto’s Stratoss a unique cloud native product has been developed over the last 3 years to meet the most complex requirements of service orchestration. The product comes with a rich set of capabilities offering a solution for end-to-end service modelling and orchestration and enabling high degree of automation both at design time and in production time operations.

Key characteristics of Stratoss product suite include:

• 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 centred around intent-based service design and operations. Whereas other products enable network intent, often only on Day 1 launch, Stratoss provides end-to-end Service-centric Intent from lab to operations.

• VNF and network equipment vendor neutrality; the product is designed to reduce vendor dependency by providing generalized, vendor neutral service modelling capabilities.

• DevOps; Vendor-agnostic DevOps and CI/CD processes for new services and change management.