EXPERT SPEAK
Transformation ahead
for service providers
As service providers adopt next generation software and cloud
enabled technologies, the need for large scale organisational
change looms ahead as well, writes Ali Amer at Cisco.
T
he challenge that service providers
are facing at present is beyond
the likes of what they have faced
before. Service providers by default
leverage the latest communication and
networking technologies to generate
growing services for their consumption
target markets. However, the challenges
of today require large scale business and
organisational changes in addition to
adopting the latest digital technologies.
Software driven technologies
facilitate new ways of working across an
organisation, enable new business models,
and support enhanced and innovative
user experiences. However, such new
technologies including network function
virtualisation, artificial intelligence, cloud
based frameworks, also require suitable
skilled resources. This talent must also be
well adapted to the new digital business
models to fit into new service provider
organisational structures and to be able to
drive the new business.
Competitors with more agile and
transformed networks are increasingly
being seen to make headway against
these disruptive forces. Service providers
now need to rethink their networks and
technologies, their organisations, and their
business models. Existing structures inside
service providers are increasingly unable to
interoperate with new digital technologies,
unable to support newly aligned revenue
and business streams, and unable to
compete with competitors built from the
ground up on digital technologies.
The required transformation of service
providers is far reaching, deep, complex,
and attached to a high probability of
failure. It is not a technology upgrade but
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a fundamental shift away from how service
providers have operated traditionally.
Automation is one of the ways for
service providers to keep up with endless
technology changes and disruptions.
Large networks are increasingly being
challenged to incorporate network
function virtualisation, software defined
networking, artificial intelligence, to drive
down costs and enhance productivity, and
enable possibilities and use cases for richer
user experience. Digitisation is driving
the current wave of business and process
disruption and availability of broadband
growing at 50%+, made available by
service providers, is the principal enabler.
However, on the flip side, the revenues
associated by the consumption of
broadband by consumers and businesses
are not necessarily being reflected in
the top line of service providers. This
draws attention to their now far overdue
need to innovate and align better with
their transforming target markets. All
the technology tools exist for service
providers to make the switch over
including extended clouds, software
defined networks, virtualisation,
programmability, certification, open
source, standards and so on.
In order to drive automation, service
providers need to increasingly embrace
orchestration and relook at their
distribution of computing resources.
With the exponential growth of end
points from Internet of Things and rapid
growth of broadband enabled connected
mobile users, many of the future compute
requirements will need to managed at
the edge of the network. This implies an
immediate and overdue overhaul of how
Ali Amer, Managing Director, Global Service
Provider Sales, Cisco Middle East and Africa.
service providers will need to deploy their
compute resources to manage these user
requirements. Service providers will need
to relook at how to optimise and balance
mobile-edge resources with deep-edge
computing resources in order to meet
future requirements, drive down costs and
increase productivity.
In another area of transformation, most
service providers by now recognise the
need for network function virtualisation.
But the reality is also that most service
providers are still at a very early stage
of its adoption. Service providers expect
network function virtualisation to deliver
cost savings and bring agility into their
business. Amongst the early inhibitors are
the inability to build an internal business
case for adoption of virtualisation, lack
of ownership on who will drive the
project, lack of software skills to provide
sustainability, inability to build an agile
organisational structure to justify the
migration to an SDN, NFV, DevOps
environment, amongst others.
By focusing on rolling out orchestration
across their networks, service providers
are taking early steps towards building
automation. Additionally, orchestration
is the primary foundation for launching
new digital services, administering them
and generating significant returns across
an automated, software enabled, optimally
distributed compute, open standards
based layered network.
Issue 14
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS