Recently, I attended FutureNet World conference in London where I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion with other industry experts from TM Forum, Three UK, and Virgin Media 02 entitled “Operational Transformation: Accelerating the Journey to Zero Touch Automation.” Overall the conference was great and everyone, including myself, was excited to be able to interact face-to-face to discuss the challenges that the network leaders have ahead of them as their global customer base settles into the new way of working in post-pandemic times.
During my time at the event, I had the pleasure of participating in and witnessing a lot of great conversations occurring around the challenges, priorities, and focuses that Communications Services Providers (CSPs) are facing. Here’s a quick recap of the key trends.
Key Trends Discussed at FutureNet World
Throughout the event, a common theme I kept hearing was that the first wave of orchestration and automation in the CSP world is nearing completion. The early adopters have moved on from their initial implementations of orchestration and automation and have begun to think about their next implementations. The technology has proven to have business value, but now it needs to become mainstream and pervasive. The next set of adopters are now able to learn from the early movers, avoiding their missteps and leveraging their innovations.
The sentiments early movers expressed and the challenges they are currently facing highlighted one of the key themes I spoke to during my panel session. They focused on solving for orchestration of activities like activations, but now their tools, and more importantly, their operations and engineering teams need to evolve towards an operational model oriented around orchestration and automation and away from processes based on old-school manual procedures.
One of the fundamental shifts that they are driving is a move from an exclusive focus on orchestration for activation towards an imperative for operational transformation. The result – orchestration and automation that permeates all aspects of the business.
They are entering a stage where lifecycle management of their automation infrastructures has become an operational concern and are beginning to implement strategies such as CI/CD pipelines for their growing asset base of orchestration and automation artifacts to create a virtuous cycle – building automations to accelerate the creation, testing, and deployment of new automations and orchestrations. I see this as a rich area for CSPs to focus, as effective implementations will provide the quality, risk management, and velocity that they will need to maximize the benefits of their orchestration and automation.
I’m looking forward to continuing the relationships formed during FutureNet World and meeting again with the folks who attended to see how they’ve progressed, and what the next wave of challenges will be.
To watch the full panel session on-demand, click here.
Morgan Stern
Vice President, Automation Strategy ‐ Itential
Morgan Stern serves as the Vice President of Automation Strategy for Itential, where he is responsible for assisting Itential’s global customers in developing, implementing and deriving value from their automation strategies using the Itential Automation Platform. For the majority of his career, Morgan has focused on assisting large enterprise and service provider organizations in maximizing the business impact of new technologies as an architect, consultant, author, and industry speaker.
