In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review, Mervat El Dabae, regional vice president, EMEA, Netcracker, shares her company’s offerings in helping operators in the region forge lasting partnerships and scale operations in line with the dynamic pace of digital transformation.
How is Netcracker helping operators become DSPs and technology enablers?
Operators today are looking to grow beyond their role as just communications providers to become digital technology enablers. They will need to become truly digital from the ground up and adopt an agile approach to embrace new partnership models. However, many operators find themselves unable to effectively adopt these new business models due to the inadequate capabilities and scaling of their BSS/OSS.
Netcracker’s modern cloud BSS/OSS and SaaS-based model offers operators a variety of ways to transform into technology enablers. Operators no longer need to worry about cumbersome BSS operations and can instead rely on an experienced agile partner to increase the speed and flexibility of their business operations.
Cloud-native BSS/OSS leverages the scalability and resiliency of the cloud to significantly reduce CAPEX and OPEX.
It also enables partnership across multiple industries with standards-based integration and a DevOps model for full service automation across the partner ecosystem and clouds.
How will service orchestration help CSPs build new business models for the enterprise market?
The transition to digital services requires a paradigm shift in how those services are managed. Legacy OSS fulfillment cannot satisfy the demands of fully digital and on-demand services like SD-WAN, SASE, MEC and dynamic 5G slicing. Operators must adopt 360-degree customer views and full lifecycle management of services for phases like planning, fulfillment and assurance.
This is where Netcracker Service Orchestration shines. It eliminates legacy OSS silos and introduces a full closed loop of design, planning, fulfillment and assurance in one stack for automated management of digital services throughout its entire lifecycle.
It delivers digital services in minutes, reduces time to market for new services from months to days and increases the efficiency of operations.
Network orchestration extends the holistic approach of lifecycle management beyond services to network layers for greater automation and combines with service orchestration to transform CSPs into DSPs.
How will 5G network slicing benefit CSPs, and how can Netcracker help?
5G network slicing promises to revolutionize customer consumption and interaction patterns for wireless networks, especially in the B2B market. Enterprises will be able to use private wireless networks with on-demand networking and an SLA-based model in different vertical applications to customize user experiences for specific application and market needs.
Compare this to today’s static situation. The current inflexibility of private networks makes them very costly and creates an unsurmountable barrier to entry. They simply do not offer enough differentiation and SLA commitments to warrant the investment except for very large enterprises with very specific use cases. 5G network slicing changes all of this by introducing the sharing economy to private wireless networks to lower the barrier to entry. This enables a larger section of the B2B market to really benefit from private networks for the first time.
For this promise to be achieved, the key concepts are ‘on-demand’ and ‘SLA’, and this is where Netcracker’s solution plays a critical role. Our AI-driven network slicing framework enables 5G providers to dynamically manage their 5G capacity and the lifecycle of every active slice from planning and design to fulfillment and assurance. It also allows providers to guarantee and monitor slice SLAs to meet customer demands and democratize access to private networks.
Can you please tell us about how Netcracker plans to grow in the EMEA region?
Netcracker has a significant presence in the Middle East due to our many long-term partnerships with almost all of the region’s tier-one providers, including stc and Etisalat.
Netcracker has recently been awarded major transformations with du, Zain and Vodafone Oman. We plan to use our expertise from our digital transformations with leading operators like Vodafone, Telefónica and Telenet to foster real growth in these upcoming projects. We are rapidly expanding in the region, and we have plans to make the Middle East a key service hub for Netcracker.
