Menachem Konorty, Head of OSS/Network Product Management at Amdocs Technology shares his insights on the new requirements for inventory, driven by today’s dynamic, hybrid networks.
Challenge and opportunity
It’s universally accepted that the communications and media industry is in the midst of another transformation due to the changes introduced by 5G and cloud technologies. Operations teams are at the sharp end of these changes, managing new complex, feature-rich networks while still handling existing infrastructure. The challenge is how to do more with less, reducing costs while managing increasing complexity. Leveraging the potential of the hybrid network to support new innovative services is vital but far from simple.
Next steps for operations
To reap the value of the new generation of technologies and services, service providers need ways to cut through the complexity. According to Konorty, there are two interconnected factors:
- Automation – the effective and efficient approach to managing complexity. In the digital age, delivering and maintaining service quality in heterogeneous and dynamic networks is driving a move from partial automation towards AI/ML-driven hyperautomation.
- Inventory modernization – automation relies on access to accurate data for generating intent-driven actions. Despite being at the heart of operations, comprehensive service and network inventory typically needs to be pulled from multiple data sources. Siloed data doesn’t meet the needs of automation. What’s required is a single source of truth that provides an end-to-end view across network domains and vendors, encompassing existing and new networks and their interdependencies. This generally requires inventory modernization.
Cross-domain, multi-layer inter-relationships
Evolution, not transformation
Inventory modernization is not a simple task in today’s landscape, where the appetite for large transformations has diminished and an agile approach is necessary. In Konorty’s experience, service providers are looking for business-focused evolution rather than revolution – a stepwise approach that takes account of existing networks and realizes benefits along the way. Such an approach must also have the flexibility to adapt to individual service provider requirements which may include:
- Federation over existing inventories, deferring or avoiding data migration
- Replacement of legacy inventories, where the ROI justifies replacement
- Addition of an inventory to support new use cases, network and services
Critical capabilities of a modernized inventory
Inventory provides a digital representation of network functions and their capabilities, a ‘digital twin’, which enables operations to understand the impact of changes before they are applied to the live network.
To meet the service providers’ operational needs, a modern inventory must offer certain key capabilities:
- Cross-domain and vendor-neutral, able to support any network, cloud and service
- An end-to-end view across new and existing networks, including their interdependencies, offering a “single pane of glass” interface
- A flexible, multi-data-source management layer that enables federated, centralized access to network and service data from any data source.
With over 20 years’ experience in inventory management, leading the market with over 50 current worldwide deployments, Amdocs has evolved its proven inventory technology to power reliable automation and support service providers as they move towards a more efficient and profitable future. Learn more about Amdocs Network Inventory.
