How Orchestration Platforms Really Work – Webinar Q&A

We recently hosted our webinar Unrestricted Access: How Orchestration Platforms Really Work and had the opportunity to answer many interesting questions from attendees. Below is the transcript of that Q&A.

You can listen in to the full webinar recording, or check out many other resources on how orchestration platforms really work here: https://www.intraway.com/LSOPlatform/

RAMON: Given your definitions for orchestration, what functions remain or are desired in an OSS?

STEVE: I think it’s what we described in the interlock. We certainly rely on an automated function to reside under the customer management layer so that’s certainly one. We currently rely on an inventory system and there’s a workforce management application, and you know those are really the main ones that I see. We are going take care of configuration, we are going take care of provisioning, we are going take care of that bottoms up. All those functionalities that we have in the service management layer are going to be handled by the orchestration platform. The ones remaining are going be the interlock number one and those others interlocks, we are not going to be developers. We should be part of your BSS, we are not going be the CRM, we are not going be part of the CPQ, we are going be part of an OSS perspective from the traditional sense, it’s going to be an ordering application.

RAMON: Excellent! Going to our second question. How can Symphonica help with new products, for example getting them to market faster?

EZEQUIEL: Symphonica design studio enables product typing and creation of new products and services as well as new technology integration, and ties all configuration, to make it easy and quick to deploy new services into the production.

RAMON: Okay, excellent so we are talking weeks here, months or something we can do faster than that?

EZEQUIEL: I believe it depends on the complexity of it, but it’s normally weeks.

STEVE: Yes, days or weeks has been our experience. A lot of it is making sure we understand what the client has on their side. I think when they see the tool, once they see how easy the tool is to use from a configuration perspective, it’s really just a matter of days.

RAMON: And the last question before we have to wrap it up: You say Symphonica is configurable. Could you give me some examples and some of the benefits? What can a client do vs what Intraway would need to do? What is coded vs configuration?

EZEQUIEL: Most functions in Symphonica are configurable. In fact, the guiding principle of the tool is to built it so the customer can manage, change or manipulate the tool without relying on Intraway. I would say that everything can be done by configuration, there is no coding involved.

RAMON: Okay excellent, Steve anything else you want to wrap up with?

STEVE: I would just say that’s been one of the main benefits that we stress with our tool. When clients are seeing the tool or we show it to prospective clients, that’s one thing that they really appreciate because with ours there’s no need to change and have to come back to us and do heavy development. We would really like to be able to train somebody that is a pretty competent business analyst or someone in engineering to use the tool. They can go into the design studio and build the connectors. Somebody that from a process flow perspective, they can go into the bpm engine. And they can really do it themselves and that’s some of the beauty of this work. Some of the tools that are out there, even though they may say they are agile, it’s a pretty long cycle between the time they want to make a change and the time they can impact it or affect it. And in our case, if you think about it in the morning, we can have it in the afternoon.

RAMON: Okay, excellent. Thank you, both.

Click here to hear the full webinar recording as well as access additional resources on what LSO platforms can do.

Additional Questions on How Intraway’s Orchestration Engine Works

1. What about orchestration of more complex products (ethernet, SDN/NFV, service chaining, cloud services)?
   A: We already demonstrated SDN orchestration capabilities with Symphonica in Cablelabs 2016. We did a provisioning demo of an L2VPN service using OpenDaylight controller and two RPis with OpenVSwitch.
2. How does your BPM engine support modeling (i.e. NETCONF, Yang, TOSCA, etc.)?
   A: We can easily build the templates in the BPM engine and send them to the ROM for provisioning on the cloud platform.
3. What role does Symphonica play in SD-WAN?
   A: Symphonica can help integrate legacy platforms with the SD-WAN controller and enable service chaining as well as provide linkage between the resource layer and the customer management layer.
4. What about data center and cloud integrations. What has Intraway/Symphonica done in this area?
   A: Symphonica is built to accommodate physical, cloud and virtual infrastructures. For example, it’s ready for 5G.
5. Talking about Security and Symphonica, what’s built into the platform from a security perspective?
   A: All Symphonica APIs are secured and support HTTPs for encryption, additionally we run security penetration tests on all the components before releasing a new version.
6. Cloudify uses open source software. Pros vs. Cons of this approach vs. Intraway.
   A: Symphonica components are all built using open source software (i.e JAVA, Activiti BPM, Spring, etc.). Intraway warrants, support and upgrades its software and brings years of experience and expertise together in provisioning and orchestration.
7. MEF 55 LSO – What functionality will Symphonica provide based on the Intraway roadmap?
   A: Service Design, Order Fulfillment and Service Control, Service Testing, Service Problem Management, Service Quality Management, Billing and Usage Management, Security, Policy-based Management, Customer Management, Partner Management.