Lumen Automates & Orchestrates its Network Operations to Drive Business Transformation with Itential

INDUSTRY

Communications Service Provider

GOALS

Accelerate Cloud & Edge Service Delivery
Scale Automation to Support Business Agility
Standardize Infrastructure Processes

USE CASES

Multi-Domain Service Orchestration

INTEGRATIONS

Key Results

Executing 200M+ automated processes per month.

Reduced customer activation time by 70%.

Reduced time to route an order from 40 days to one.

Reduced time from ordering to provisioning a VPN service from +2 weeks to 2 days.

Integrated with control systems for multiple networks with 50+ unique systems.

Challenge: Increasing Network Complexity Means Increasing Process Complexity

As one of the leading global telecommunications providers, Lumen is always finding ways to deliver the fastest, most secure platform for next-gen applications and data. Their customers span 60 countries and they maintain over 450,000 miles of global router fiber. To provision services quickly and efficiently across an increasingly complex network spanning edge and hybrid cloud, unifying internal processes, customer purchase workflows, and disparate networking products was essential.

Cloud and edge presented new challenges that we couldn’t scale to meet. At least not by continuing to do things the same way.

Director, Networking

Solution: Centralized Network Infrastructure Orchestration with Itential

To standardize Lumen’s internal network operations to effectively drive business transformation through increased productivity, efficiency, and customer experience, they chose to partner with Itential. Itential’s platform enables Lumen to orchestrate functions such as order management, service provisioning, and service assurance across their multiple network domains.

By leveraging Itential’s API-first, machine-first model, they can drive automation across field operations, service assurance, and service delivery. The orchestration layer uses Itential to integrate with the control systems for each of the separate networks with over 50+ unique systems and network technologies to provide end-to-end visibility and management. Itential users can orchestrate services across all their distributed network infrastructure, streamlining, standardizing, and accelerating service delivery through the platform’s:

End-to-End Orchestration: Seamless integration across their multi-vendor, multi-domain infrastructure, incorporating existing Python scripts and adapting to their network’s complexity.
User Friendly Workflow Builder: Allows non-developers to create automations based on their technology domain expertise.
Self-Service Delivery: Ability to expose functionality via API or automation catalog for self-service capabilities.
Out-of-the-Box Integration Capabilities: Rapidly generate API integrations and leverage pre-built integrations for common systems like ServiceNow, Meraki, and internal systems enabling faster time-to-value.
Built-In Network Intelligence: Enables a limitless array of network orchestration capabilities without the deep network specific knowledge such as payload data transformation and policy design/execution.
Scalable Platform: Built on a modern technology stack designed to scale up to the largest networks in the world.

Itential has made it possible for our customers to utilize the Lumen application and data delivery platform in a way that best suits their individual needs –regardless of product mix, location, scale, scope and speed.

Richard Batelaan, EVP North America Operations

Accelerating Customer Service Delivery to Rapidly Meet Market Demands

By leveraging DevOps principles combined with the ease of use of the Itential Automation Platform, the Lumen IT and Operations teams were able to partner and quickly deliver end-to-end automations scaling over 200 million jobs and tasks per month. This has resulted in enabling customers to rapidly respond to changing market demands by providing agile, on-demand and responsive network and cloud services.