HPE’s intelligent automation announcement got the ball rolling at TM Forum’s annual gathering in Nice. Given that the show is titled Digital Transformation World, expect a deluge of similar messaging in the coming days.
HPE announced a new suite of management tools aimed at helping network operators to automate network operations in hybrid physical and virtual environments. As operators face the reality of exponential increases in network complexity in support of 5G, IoT and cloud native service delivery models, most acknowledge the need to automate network operations in order to manage the requirements.
HPE’s Intelligent automation announcement strikes many (but not all) of the right chords
Given that operators routinely site the difficulty in leveraging massive amounts of network data to make meaningful network operations decisions, HPE opted to structure its announcement in terms of helping operators to make meaningful use of network data to automate operations. In particular, HPE cited the following capabilities as being cornerstones of the product launch:
- HPE Intelligent Assurance helps operations find specific network pattern behaviors, replacing manual discovery with automatic process.
- HPE Intelligent Assurance can work 24/7 at extracting value out of huge amounts of historical data.
- The HPE Intelligent Assurance suite can combine with HPE Unified Correlation & Automation (UCA) to automate remediation procedures.
- The solution supports data lakes based on Hadoop Open Source platforms, which can help to accelerate return on investment for customers who already created their own operations support systems (OSS) data lake.
In addition, the vendor noted that its new suite will also contain an array of reporting and analysis tools to help operators glean meaningful insights from its data lakes. However, HPE did not specify what type of specific insights the platform will help to produce, or how those insights can help to tackle the key question marks that continue to hamper automated network operations adoption to date.
Intelligent network automation will be on full display in Nice
For more than a decade, TM Forum’s annual gathering has been the premier place for OSS and BSS vendors to showcase their network management solutions. Over the past few years, that focus has taken a decided turn towards digital transformation tools and strategies. This year’s focus should take things one step further by showcasing proof of concepts, demonstrations, and new product announcements aimed at helping operators to leverage advanced analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools in pursuit of fully automated, closed-loop operations.
While HPE’s got out of the gate early with a formal product announcement, Netcracker also announced today that it will have several Catalyst projects and demos on display aimed at helping operators move towards the goal of closed-loop network management. The importance of increasingly automated network operations is taking on an increased urgency as forthcoming 5G standards are pushing the industry towards initial deployments. In turn, this will drive further drive the appetite to pursue IIoT and other cloud native service delivery models. Coming full circle, this will mandate further adoption of technology aimed at enabling network virtualization, network slicing and increased network automation.
Given this virtuous cycle of futurism, expect this week in Nice to see a torrent of news related to new and better intelligence automation tools. In general, most of these tools should be able to demonstrate good use of ML, AI and other tools to produce insights and drive decisions.  The key will be how well these solutions can overcome the fundamental trust issues that operators still have when it comes to removing human decision making from the network operations process.
