The TM Forum Digital Transformation World Series has officially kicked off and we are thrilled to be showcasing our Catalyst Project at the digital event, “Dynamic Edge Enabled Applications.” In partnership with DGIT Systems, IBM, Cisco, and Vodafone, we’ve created a truly remarkable Proof of Concept that reimagines current approaches and technologies to provide an automated, dynamic architecture for end-to-end service activation, further enabling a dynamic customer experience.
This project takes a fundamentally different approach to digitizing the customer service order-to-activation journey through the adoption of dynamic architectural principles throughout the fulfillment stack – from Self Management Portal to real-time Network Control. Let’s dive into the specifics of this project and how the Itential Automation Platform is dynamically orchestrating edge compute and communication services to support real-time application demand.
Building a Dynamic Architecture to Support Edge Applications
For this project, we’ve built an end-to-end solution that connects a self-service end user to network and cloud service control and activation. By exploiting the TMF Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and leveraging TMF Open APIs, we’ve created a turnkey solution that can overlay on any Communications Service Provider (CSP) network and cloud infrastructures. Let’s take a look at how we did it.
The architecture created for this demo is inclusive of innovative technologies provided by Itential, DGIT Systems, IBM, Cisco and Vodafone, arranged using TMF principles to form a seamless end-to-end stack for the rapid consumption, provisioning, and connectivity of dynamic enabled edge applications across a multi-domain network. At the heart of this architecture is the Itential Automation Platform. Itential provides flexible integration, automation, and federation capabilities that that make it simple and quick for anyone to define combined services and orchestrate them from start to finish. For this specific project, Itential’s ability to consume and integrate with any combination of TMF APIs and a variety of vendor-native APIs enables teams to build and expose network facing resources more rapidly. This further increases the ability to adapt to the rate of change and innovation in the network to support these edge applications in order to realize the Network Automation as a Service (NaaS) capabilities of the full architecture.
This architecture leverages an API-driven layered approach to integrate with multi-domains and technologies, including, SD-WAN overlay, MEF services, cloud, and edge applications. A layer of orchestration architecture has been implemented in the Itential Automation Platform to perform end-to-end orchestration against domain specific controllers such as Cisco NSO and Meraki, Azure, and IBM. One of the additional capabilities making this project successful is Itential’s native ability to federate and transform data that comes with cross domain automation. In addition, the open nature of our integrations layer allows customers to expand their automations to address new domains or adapt new requirements dynamically at any point in the future.
Check out the full demo of this solution:
Itential’s Agnostic Approach to Dynamic Architecture
One of the main reasons we’re so excited to showcase this Catalyst Project at TM Forum is because we’re able to highlight the core functionality the Itential Automation Platform was built on, integration and federation. The flexible and scalable architecture for this project was designed to support self-service provisioning and activation of network services, only made possible by the Itential’s vendor and domain agnostic capabilities. By leveraging Itential along with exposing TMF APIs northbound, this solution can support new use cases and services in a fraction of the time that traditional, purpose-built activation stacks typically take.
As a key enabler for the dynamic customer experience, CSPs are provided the highest level of flexibility to integrate with any system, allowing users to integrate both through TMF API specifications as well another type of APIs required.
If you’re attending the TM Forum Digital Showcase this year, be sure to stop by our Catalyst Space and let us know what you think! You can find out more information here. If you’d like to learn more about how Itential can help Communications Service Provider, check out our full list of CSP solutions or schedule a demo with one of our experts 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.
