In her article Unlocking the Real Value of SDN/NFV, Jennifer Faulkner, Oracle’s Director of Business Services Solutions, considers the need for flexible OSS/BSS to enable software defined networking.
With SDN and NFV accelerating up the hype-curve, there seems little doubt that software defined and virtualised networks will change everything. Eventually.
But, inevitable the focus has been on how networks will change. What about the implications to systems and processes that affect customer experience?
What good is a speedy car that’s stuck in first gear? It’s great to have new agile network technologies to play with, but most service providers are locked with old processes and barely flexible management tools.
Faulkner considers a number of areas of impact, including what needs to change in BSS/OSS architectures:
- Configurable metadata-driven product definitions and fulfillment processes
- Dynamic orchestration that decouples commercial operations, services operations and resource management layers
- An open architecture that puts the control in the hands of service providers
Which is exactly what all the OSS vendors said they were delivering in the 90s for optical networks and the 00s for IP networks.
And now SDN/NFV changes everything. Again.
Every new network technology introduces a new set of things the CSP can do in slow-time to design the network. And a new set of things the network can do in real-time to react to traffic and users.
Read the full article at Vanilla Plus.