Top Questions on Adding Orchestration to Multi-Vendor Network [Webinar Q&A Transcript]

Sandra Bobadilla, Business Development and Steve Marsh, Intraway’s North America CTO, hosted our second webinar Lessons Learned: Adding Orchestration to Multi-Vendor Networks. In it, they discussed the main areas operators should consider before embarking on an orchestration project. After the presentation, participants shared their questions with the speakers. Here’s the transcript for our adding orchestration Q&A.

For additional resources on orchestration, check out our complete toolkit for orchestration project success.

What is the best strategy for digital transformation: AC forklift approach, cap, and groove or a phased approach by segment, not technology?

Steve:

I don’t know anybody that’s taking a forklift. I think the closest thing I’ve seen to that it’s what eighteen TE comp is doing. They’re going to have central offices in the data center, and there’s a pretty big initiative in a program around that.

In our experience, at least for the folks, it’s almost like dip your toe in the water, see what’s possible. Sort of proves some of the proof points if you will, and start seeing some success on a small scale. So maybe I take one product, maybe in business services, where today I’ve got a fairly manual solution, and the automation will help from the manual nature of it. But, maybe with my orchestration solution, I can also deploy an app out on the field services reps; either laptop, phone or whatever and do some bottoms-up provisioning. To me at least, that is what we’ve seen over the last 18 or 24 months, the approach that seems to get because it’s just going in and ask for X amount of money up front and say I’m going to change the world. That’s not going to happen.

To be able to go in and say hey I’m going to look at one product or one line of business and I’m going to prove it, then I´m going to have success under my belt. Then I can come in and ask for the next chunk of money or whatever, that seems to be the approach that I think plays the best.

Sandra:

I would agree. I mean, a lot of them are also starting with some of the new services such as dynamic services and then start moving on the services. They see a lot more benefit in the automation and optics reduction.

Steve:

If you do a bit of a capping grille right where you just say like I’m going to offer a cloud-based security service or something like that, that you can do, but when you have to tie those NFE or cloud services to the legacy infrastructure from a service training perspective, that is when it gets sticky. Because now I’ve got to talk to a Miller where my product catalog is and some of that kind of stuff. It just becomes sticky if you don’t adopt and get the framework and sort of the domains we talked about earlier.

I want to point out though, that often times, the orchestration initiative, triggers or spawns other initiatives that need to be done right now. I need to go short with my inventory, or I need to go, I was talking about pulling my product catalog out on my biller and actually putting in an EPC or CPQ or something like that.

So sometimes you realized that going down this road, can’t just mean to go down the orchestration road. You need to do a couple of other things that are either create, represents, or go in parallel. I didn’t mention that, but it’s important.

In Intraway’s experience, what department usually ends up as an owner of the orchestrator; the knob, the quality, engineering, operations, other?

Steve:

We haven’t found a case yet where there is sort of one owner. There´s always a primary owner and a secondary owner. Typically, the primary owner seems to be in engineering or operations which is under the CTO organization. But then they can’t do it without the CIO or the app dev team. If the app dev team is the owner, they can’t do it without the engineering and operations team.

To me, it’s always those two organizations. One with their hand on the wheel and one in the passenger seat or vice-versa. But it has to be those two and then, to make it a success, those two have to get somebody in the product area, to understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and how they’re going to get beneficiated with it.

My final answer, I guess, would be engineering operations with app development and in support, the engineering team. But to be successful you need somebody in the back seat, and that needs to be product management.

Sandra:

I guess that goes into a lot of the organizational transformation that we are seeing, not only in operators but in other enterprise companies, where both IT and operations are either merging or at least coming under the same CTO because now the collaboration has to be strong between those two areas. This is basically what a lot of these software-driven businesses that we’re getting into are leaning towards. Those organizations need that collaboration between the two entities.

Steve:

Things like that happen, and in jobs and most types of things, those are all terms that start morphing.I said several years ago that the right answer is to really have service teams around service products, so you have all of the functionality, even product management, as part of the service team. So those traditional, sort of functional fences are certainly going away. And if you move into a web-scale type of places like Apple or Facebook, they aren’t aligned like the traditional MSOs or CSPs are at all.

Has Intraway delivered solutions that also integrate with external service provider APIs? The scenario would be when an outside provider service or platform is a component of the end-to-end service associated with or incremental to an in-house configuration. What limitations may apply in this scenario?

Steve:

The nice thing about Symphonica is the flexibility of the interfaces. We adopt industry standard API’s, and we can also tailor the interfaces. Some are easier than others, but we haven’t come across one that we haven’t been able to integrate with. You’ve been doing this longer than I have at Intraway, Sandra, but I haven’t come across one yet and in the folks that we’re working with, we haven’t been able to find or create a solution. I mean sometimes it’s not just a black and white API that they just publish and we can go easily and grab the information we need. We have to do a little bit of tailoring on our side, we have to build a middleware solution between their interface and ours.

But we haven’t come across one that we haven’t been able to address or to get through, so whether it’s internal application or technology or third-party, or new start or something like that. How about you Sandra?

Sandra:

Yes, that is correct. Just another thing to add in this regards it´s that we are very active and aware of what the MEF is doing around at their third networks. That is basically the standardization on an east-west type of interfaces. So right now a lot of things that are being done might be ad hoc, but eventually, there is a lot of standardization going on.Especially MEF, is looking a lot into that Third Network Vision which includes the scenario that is being described here. That’s something to be on the lookout, just to integrate into the open API’s.

Steve:

That’s great! I was talking more North-South, and you were talking East-West, so I missed that in the question, I apologize. But yeah I think the SDO’s are addressing the need to make the infrastructure whether is mine or is one of my service partners, regardless of the geography or to be seamless from a customer perspective. And we’re trying to make sure that we enable that from our orchestration platform.

How does a service provider go from starting the process of building an orchestration framework? Who should they call for help?

Steve:

It’s not news. Now it’s a case of how do I do it, and I think that’s a case of knowing that there are no magic solutions to future state processors or documenting the current process or whatever. There’s work involved in that, and I think it recognizes to you that the benefit is worth the effort and it´s having the discipline to sit down and say: okay I’m going to put myself together a roadmap, and find the various stakeholders that I need. I’m gonna get a partner that I think I trust and value. You know, like search some experience in the space that can help me. One of the things we bring to the table is our work around TM forum and the standards. We have a lot of experience with process optimization and those types of things.

The BPM engine forces us to get those processes to current state and future state to find, and then you just get on with it. You need to have the sort of stamina to say it´s going to be, I don’t want to say long, but it’s going to be tough. So it may be over the course of picking a time frame, six or eight weeks or whatever, we’ve got an awful lot of work that we’ve got to get ourselves through. But if we get ourselves through it, we can tailor this solution in a way that can deliver 80 or 90 plus percent automation, and that’s what, in fact, we need to have in order to be able to support those dynamic services in the future.

Check out the complete webinar recording, our 20-page guide and much more in our complete toolkit for orchestration project success.