Business Case

The Telco Network Cloud Orchestration (TNC-O) Business case

TNC-O helps service providers effectively streamline service delivery, minimize complexity, and deliver innovative new services to customers at significant speed and lower cost of operations.

The problem our product solves and our value proposition are explained as follows:

Service providers are undergoing a platform and business transformation at the same time. One in support of the other.

For business, Service providers must find new sources of revenue growth and strive for higher profit margins. Transforming their business from delivering a small number of very large services to mass market customers, to delivering a long pipeline of smaller and more niche services, targeting specific markets - quickly scaling services that are successful and retiring those that are not.

In support of this business model Service Providers are transforming their delivery platform to a Cloud-based model, enabling a virtualized or software driven automated and agile factory.

To achieve this business model, the cost and effort involved in bringing these niche services to market must be as close to zero as possible, and as these services need to scale, the cost model associated must also scale in a predictable fashion. Traditionally, with large mass market services, ongoing maintenance is performed by throwing people at any issues or maintenance tasks. With a long pipeline of new services, this will not be acceptable. These ongoing maintenance tasks must be automated as much as possible.

Because network appliances and applications are software-based, they can be brought to market quickly and scaled and maintained in a much more automated manner. Also, network applications can be blended or integrated with Enterprise Cloud applications to bring high value media products and services to market. Traditional appliances require a lot of manual activity to install, configure and maintain physical appliances.

Why is this business model required?

NFV automation in particular is more complex than traditional physical network appliances. It forces the separation of network software from a new Cloud based hardware infrastructure management platform. NFV infrastructure in particular, and VNF management tools are, as a result much more aligned with Enterprise Cloud/IT than traditional telecoms environments. In fact, NFV network applications are much more aligned with software engineering practices than traditional networking.

This new model sees large numbers of interconnected software applications deployed across a highly distributed set of Cloud like data centers. Enterprise Cloud environments typically have a small number of huge data centers, conversely service providers have a large number of smaller data centers, with lots of connections or dependencies between the software applications deployed across them. This complexity raises some significant skills issues in the operational teams that today bring new products and service to market those that are responsible for their ongoing maintenance.

Engineering must integrate and test many 3rd party software applications across a number of infrastructure platforms and operations must now understand how to identify resolutions to issues across a highly complex set of environments that they are not today skilled for.