Focus on Network-as-a-Service | TelecomDrive.com
Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has become one of the hottest areas of industry innovation as service providers strive to deliver solutions that can quickly adapt to changing customer demands in the hyper-connected digital economy.
NaaS platforms combine on-demand connectivity, application assurance, cybersecurity, and multi-cloud-based services across automated networks to help enterprises achieve business outcomes without having to build and maintain their own infrastructure.
NaaS solutions are elastic and dynamic and generally will offer many advanced capabilities – including user control, real-time and application-driven changes, end-to-end performance visibility, pay-as-you go and monthly subscription options, etc. – that require coordination of a federation of resources provided by numerous partners in an automated ecosystem. NaaS, at its core, represents a new way to deliver network services and capabilities that will be made of piece parts of many providers, which could include retail service providers, wholesale service providers, hyperscalers, technology solution providers, data center providers, and others.
The importance of resource coordination sometimes is lost in discussions about the huge growth opportunity for the global NaaS market, but it is fundamental to the conversation and is an important issue for every player in the NaaS ecosystem to consider.
Put simply, NaaS cannot be done without automation. And for the global NaaS market to reach its full potential, this automation must be standards-based. Further, automation must happen throughout the supply chain where all parties in the supply chain adopt a standard set of processes and APIs at both the business process and operational levels.
Here, we are talking about the need for standardized APIs used to automate more than 20 separate functions in the complete lifecycle of a typical service, including the following:
- Business functions: address validation, site query, product catalog, product offering qualification, product offering availability discovery, quote, price discovery, product order, product inventory, trouble ticketing and incidents, appointment, work order, and billing and settlement.
- Operational functions: service provisioning and control, service inventory, service function testing, performance monitoring profiles, passive real-time and historical statistics, threshold crossing alert profile and alerts, streaming management, and fault management.
MEF recently released an extensive State of the Industry Report: Paradigm Shift – Automating Business Functions Between Service Providers that provides a comprehensive overview of the latest advancements and trends in the telecommunications sector. It explains why using standardized business and operational APIs is critically important for unlocking market opportunities for NaaS and other next-generation services. It is a must-read for service provider professionals planning to automate with ecosystem partners as well as other individuals seeking to stay abreast of the rapidly evolving service automation landscape.
While a number of service providers up to now have invested in custom, pairwise APIs to automate business and/or operational functions with a limited number of high-volume buy/sell partners, customizing APIs for each significant partner and multiple types of services with these partners would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Clearly, this is not a sustainable approach for building a large and vibrant automated ecosystem capable of supporting NaaS across multiple partners.
MEF’s State of the Industry report also explains that standards-based business and operational APIs provide the high fidelity (tightly defined context), plug- and-play interoperability, and the extensibility required to enable service providers to “invest once” and efficiently scale implementations with many partners and services.
Additionally, the MEF State of the Industry Report sheds light on emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities in the telecommunications industry. It provides insights into topics like cybersecurity, edge computing, IoT connectivity, and cloud-native architectures.
To access this comprehensive and informative report, visit the MEF website or contact the MEF directly for more information.
