Customer experience of network services – how to order them, when they will be delivered, how well and quickly they can be tailored to customer requirements – is now heavily influenced by the digital user experience forged in the Web domain.
Heavy Reading research finds that the ability to turn up Layer 2-7 services and change bandwidth on demand are critical influencers of customer buying decisions. Both require operators to be operationally agile, a quality that can only be achieved through changes to the organization, processes and tools that support the delivery of network services.
Traditional network operations are ripe for transformation because they are too slow and inflexible to provide a digital user experience of the network. Operators still have network operations that are largely unautomated, resulting in long lead times for service introduction and provisioning. If operators are to become more agile, they need more automation, but not at the expense of becoming locked into long- term engagements with vendor professional services organizations.
Operators want to follow the lead of the IT world, which is using the extreme automation concepts of DevOps to cut service delivery times and enable an online user experience of IT services. DevOps needs to become “NetOps,” to reflect network operations’ far more complex task of delivering network services across multi- vendor, hybrid physical/virtual networks. NetOps needs a platform to support the automation of this task and one that empowers operators to build this automation for themselves.
