Service Providers

Partner Use Case

Overview

Partner is a leading communications operator in Israel, providing a broad range of communications services (mobile cellular telephony, fixed-line telephony, international telephony, Internet services, transmission, data communications and PRI) under the Partner and 012 Smile brands. Partner provides mobile cellular communications services to some 2.8 million subscribers in Israel, which constitutes a market share of about 28%. Its acquisition of 012 Smile was the realization of one of the components of Partner’s growth strategy for evolving from a cellular provider to a leading communications company in Israel offering a spectrum of advanced communications and media services. Partner’s principal shareholder is S.B. Israel Telecom Ltd., with a stake of approximately 30.2%. Founded in 1999. Partner is a public company, whose shares are traded on the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange and whose ADSs are traded on the NASDAQ’s Global Select Market in the United States.

Before/After
Challenges
Solution
Benefits

Customer Network Status

Before
After

The Partner transport network included a variety of devices from Juniper and Telco Systems. The system was used to deliver the different services for business, residential, mobile backhaul and FTTH. Partner was using Excel files to keep track of service delivery, setting or terminating services and fault management. There was no visual representation of the system topology and inventory.

Any configuration or change of setting was done by identifying all the relevant elements that would be affected and manually accessing them to make the requisite changes. Any faulty device or other fault in the network was handled using the same manual method of identifying faulty units and physically configuring or replacing them to overcome the fault.

Partner was looking for significant operating costs reductions and to gain competitive advantage while achieving faster on-boarding and delivery of new services/product to its business customers, at a lower cost and with an SLA offering.

NetACE was implemented to perform an intensive network audit, discovery and smart, network-resource-aware service activation across Partner’s multi-vendor network. NetACE is used for immediate and fully-automated issue isolation per network service/customer and automatic reconciliation actions to overcome any system malfunction. In addition, any new service/device installation is done in seconds, as the process is fully automated in Partner’s multi-vendor, multi-layer and multi-technology network. With NetACE, the number of configuration errors has been reduced by ~90 %, largely owing to the solution’s network-resource-aware service activation. Moreover, outages caused by human configuration errors have been eliminated almost completely.

Challenges

1
Create automated way to set configure and terminate new and existing services across multi-vendor network
2
Automatic discovery of existing equipment and services
3
Visual display of current network devices and services topology

Solution

Discovers all network assets (brownfield) and builds real-time service and network inventory. Ensures consistent and up-to-date resource and service inventory data that coexists with 3rd party tools such as in-house script-based activation and tens of CLI enthusiasts.

Vendor Benefits

  • Enables cost effective, agile, in-house design and modelling of network services and their activation logic using code-less on-screen design tools. This enables rapid and low-cost onboarding of new vendors/technologies and new services/products, as well new resource objects for discovery and management.
  • Enables rapid, automated and error-free service operations – including validation and policy-driven reservation of network resources, network-resource-aware and dynamic activation, discovery of tenant/per service configurational and operational status, modification, automatic reconciliation, deletion. All this supports multi-vendor, multi-layer networks based on accurate real-time view of service and network state data.
  • Enables first-minute-available model-based per service/customer health validations, compliance checks and discrepancy identification for a quick root cause analysis or automatic reconciliation.
  • Enables network configuration management – storing the configuration of all network elements (doing periodical backups), restoring that configuration when needed, and managing the configuration file versions. Performs network element upgrade activities, pushing bulk configuration modifications, identifying device-level configuration discrepancy, and more.