Efficient service creation has always been a frontier of growth in the telecom industry. Reliable and methodical service creation is crucial for the evolution of telecom domain as the market moves towards its future business goals. The notion of good service creation is connected strongly to the concept of intelligent service in the telecommunication networks.
However, with the increased business of agile web companies, the network operators are struggling to retain their customers. Their ability to develop, launch, improvise and eliminate services in short time is vital to capture the attention and business of the customer. The current network architectures do not allow provisioning and roll out of agile services. Operators need improvement in their service creation environment through automation or orchestration services that can lift their traditional networks to the level of agility and elasticity that cloud offers.
What is Service Orchestration?
Orchestration of services is the management of life cycle of various services like; conceptualizing new services and delivering these services to the consumers. Orchestration services chain multiple network elements together to develop and deliver any services. The goal of orchestrating services is to automate every process and propagate it through the entire network across physical and virtual elements of the enterprise.
What drives Orchestration services?
For various communication service providers, the orchestration of services on end to end of physical and virtual infrastructure is the most challenging task. However, if the enterprise gets it right, it leads to operational savings and higher agility. There are many factors that drive orchestration services in an organization like;
- Increased agility
- Ability to offer services on real-time demands
- Reducing capital expenditure; operators can reduce their capital expenditure by 50 per cent by orchestrating their services
How Can Orchestration Services Help in Life Cycle Management of Products?
A streamlined network empowers the business of operators by helping them in conceptualizing new services and introducing them rapidly to the customers. Effective lifecycle management with the help of orchestration services can be achieved in five steps stated below;
1. Conceptualization
The marketing teams and business unit owners of operators can leverage the agility of services provided by automation platforms to introduce new services and target multiple groups of customers with specific interests. With orchestration, costs can b lowered, which can help operators in breaking their targets and make quick decisions on the efficiency of the services without disrupting the operational functionality.
2. Designing
One of the major goals of service orchestration is to involve subject matter experts (SMEs) in designing of the networks. This requires an orchestration services platform that can effectively bridge the operation team and the marketing teams. For the accomplishment of this task, the SMEs must quickly create service templates using various orchestration tools.
3. Deployment
Network experts can always accelerate and simplify service creation by using orchestration services. They can use various abstraction layers for creating configurations and push them to appropriate networks at once. If the platform used has an ability to record steps and configurate artefacts in their native forms, then each element and method can be used to create services using templates.
4. Execution
The methods after getting recorded can be re-deployed at will from a centralized manager that can translate the templates to their specific configurations in the right sequence. Using an automation platform increases the agility of services and also provides business advantages like; reduction in time to deploy, test, change and launch the services.
5. Assurance
Service orchestration is more than just deploying a service quickly. It can also be said as the ability to re-orchestrate various quality of the service like; network traffic changes to maintain the service level agreements. These changes require complete visibility into the network and even the devices of the end user. It will ensure that the configuration is working appropriately, and enterprises should also compare the key performance indicators to determine the working status of the services.
With the advancement of the competition and the increased role of agile web companies and OTTs, the operators need to unify and orchestrate their services. With the help of orchestration services, they can identify short-term goals be it revenue or operational. Operators need to move swiftly towards the future of service creation with orchestration services and automation to stay ahead of their competition.
