The newly increased demand for a paradigm shift in proactive quality assertion presents a significant challenge to operators. Traditional means of managing telecommunications networks are obsolete, and now is the time to automate. The increased capabilities of telco networks, driven by disaggregation and software-defined systems, demand improved visualization, monitoring, and assurance of the network. B-Yond provides the solutions and products required to mediate this demand. Our AI-Infused Network Services Automation solutions enable network optimization and monetization, enticing the telecom industry to "Operate Differently"!
Why modernize? Enable Net New Sticky Network Services
We are in an era where we must introduce comprehensive automation by leveraging the power of AI— which B-Yond believes must first begin with the complete AI-Infused NetDevOps tool and business chain solutions. This shift is mandatory on a technological level. Giants in the telecom industry have been actively pursuing this shift for the past couple of years—with some claiming that their "network will be 55-75 percent virtualized by 2021" (TM Forum).
Where should the shift begin? AI-infused transformative network services solutions
Fragmentation of vendor landscapes, network function disaggregation (VNF, CNF), software-defined networking (SDN), and the transition to Hybrid Telco Cloud primarily determine the state of telecommunication networks. As a result, the telecommunications industry requires a paradigm shift toward faster production network services, powered by automated and continuous self-healing network services, which will boost overall efficiency and monetization. B-Yond is working hard to close this gap in the industry and provide our partners with the most cutting-edge AI transformative network management approaches, demonstrating that AI isn’t just hype; it’s a requirement.
How should we move forward? Use Continuous Assurance
Several operators have unsuccessfully tried leveraging Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) from Staging to Preproduction to Production. These costly endeavors haven't delivered tangible results. Instead, Continuous Validation (CV) and Continuous Assurance (CA) are the keys to achieving measurable success. CV/CA enables faster production network service deployments while continuously optimizing and monetizing these new services.
Traditional CI and CD toolchains are well known. Still, Telco workloads and network functions are a challenge when applying CI/CD. Essentially, these parts of the end-to-end process ensure that each new function or version journeys through multiple environments (recently, hybrid clouds) and is tested for software consistency towards delivering network services.
The AI-Infused Continuous Validation (CV) is where the telco-specific magic begins. First, we ensure that the network function operates as a self-contained seamless software solution and as an actual telco function supporting an end-to-end service. There are three main phases in this stage:
- Interface Level Validation – validating interop and standards compliance metrics
- Sub-System Level Validation – validating compliance to telco service levels
- End to End (E2E) service-level Validation – validating SDx – Service Delivery Experience
Each of these phases must operate, both in part and jointly, through a variety of scenarios.
Many operators are already attempting to manage a large part of this necessity, albeit unsuccessfully. The challenge is two-fold. First and most impactful, a noticeable higher degree of volume and scale is required and expected. Second, with more individual functions, there is a multitude of scenarios, one of which our volume of testing increases by order of magnitude. This increase in volume testing, in turn, requires a higher degree of automation and precise fault and error isolation.
By extension, with more testing comes more errors and further delays to production. B-Yond mitigates this issue by introducing AI-Infused Continuous Validation. With the ability to automatically identify the testing fallout and pinpoint its root cause with its "fix", this last stage of the automation cycle can finally scale to meet the much-needed demand.
This same chain needs to engage throughout the production network as well. B-Yond deploys its AI-Infused Continuous Assurance (CA) chain to monitor the network and its services in search of any anomalies that may occur, either by passive consumption of data or via active injection of simulated service consumption. Of course, even once discovered, not all anomalies are created equal. So, we must answer the question if the issue is indeed a real problem; the next step is locating the root cause to initiate the remediation process.
In our experience, taking the end to end Continuous Assurance in-house (versus outsourced to OEM's), automating it (via AI/ML), and treating the production network as an extension of the lab (versus having two extremely separate and unequal networks) allows telcos to reap benefits in several ways. From financial savings for operations to customer efficiency and satisfaction, our clients share this mantra with us, Automation Intelligence.
The need for telcos to adopt Continuous Assurance solutions to remain lucrative and competitive is undisputable. Analyses of Tier 1 NA Operator use cases revealed that early issue capture exponentially reduces costs and increases OpEx. The call to action is clear; it’s time to “Operate Differently”.
B-Yond's AI-infused end-to-end life cycle network and service automation product, named AGILITY, answers CSP needs for all the previously mentioned network components that should be automated. Communication Service Providers can deploy cloud-native AGILITY to experience its value in preproduction and production environments. Its root cause analysis. Anomaly detection and remediation capabilities enable optimized customer service delivery experiences (SDx). As a critical component of post-production deployment and subscriber data capture, AGILITY completes the end-to-end process. By reducing test and validation life cycles from hours to minutes, increasing service validation capacity 10X, reducing service delivery costs by 50% (on average), and detecting anomalies/ providing root causes/ remediations in real-time—we have deemed CI/CD/Labs to be dead, Long Live CV/CA - Continuous Assurance!
