“Action is the foundational key to all success,” – Pablo Picasso
In our previous blog on telco digital transformation, we outlined the three key priorities that telcos must address to make their transformation a success: modernize, automate and monetize. Unfortunately, not all telcos have the time, knowledge or resources to move ahead with these priorities. This lack of resources leaves many telcos knowing they should do something, but not knowing how to make it happen. As outlined in our new eBook, VMware Telecom Modernization Services Overview, there are four phases of the transformation process that every telco leader should address.
To achieve the flexibility provided by cloud networking and to maintain the performance, reliability and quality of traditional networks, communication service providers (CSP) need a platform that combines telco-specific cloud-native solutions and cloud-first automation with consistent infrastructure. VMware has a complete solution set called the Telco Cloud Platform (TCP). The TCP consists of functions both at the core of the telco cloud and at the edge of the telco cloud (e.g., radio access network). The VMware Professional Services team is uniquely positioned to help you design, deploy and operate a cloud-first network. VMware Professional Services can help you adopt the people, processes and technology to effectively establish an open, disaggregated and vendor-agnostic ecosystem so you can streamline 5G service delivery from design to lifecycle management automation, all while creating a unified, developer-friendly architecture with key capabilities for resource optimization, operational consistency, multi-cloud mobility and multi-layer automation. VMware Professional Services will help you start your telco transformation through four key areas depending on where you think you need the most help. Those areas of focus are plan/design, build/onboard, run/operate and operate/expand.
1. Plan/design
It all starts up front with planning and design. The VMware team will help you build a business case based on your short- and long-term corporate goals. Once the business case is complete, our professionals will create a strategy for transforming your network. Our goal is to help you move quickly to stay ahead of an ever-changing market, but not so fast that your daily operations are interrupted. We will help create the perfect balance based on hundreds of hours of experience with telco transformations. To be sure your network can scale and can support rapid deployment of new services and in new markets, our team will help determine an automation strategy, assess end-to-end deployment and automation requirements, assist with site planning, conduct a gap analysis, create an integration plan, and create a roadmap to help keep everyone aligned on this transformation journey. Our team will then help you plan for the day-to-day operations of your new network. For daily operations planning, our team will assess current operations, identify gaps, establish use cases, help set KPIs and objectives, and finalize an operations roadmap.
Our overall goal is to align business objectives and develop a transformation strategy roadmap and business case (TCO/ROI) including people, process and technology by assessing infrastructure and operational readiness.
2. Build/onboard
After careful planning, we will walk you through deployment and integration. Our team brings a wide range of expertise to help you avoid any roadblocks and detours with your rollout. Based on the roadmap and strategy laid out in the planning sessions, VMware professionals will implement the best infrastructure to help you fulfill the vision of delivering an application on any cloud anywhere. Once the infrastructure is in place, our team will help with the deployment and validation of your automation plan through design, automation and an in-depth knowledge transfer. To track that the network is operating efficiently, we will Install TCO reporting, admin UI, and design and implement data collectors. We will set up best practices configurations and validate the implementation. To round out deployment, our team will create CI/CD to automate certification, validation, performance and interoperability testing and to automate rollout.
3. Run/operate
Once deployment is complete, VMware Professional Services will transition and prepare you for day-to-day operation. Our engineers will coordinate aligning organizations and processes to enable automation, integration and service delivery. In addition, we will onboard Virtual Function (VNF)/Cloud Native Network Functions (CNF) to the telco cloud for easy expansion and upgrades. To keep the network running smoothly, we will set up a policy-based automated release, configuration management and workload placement. To give you visibility and keep things running smoothly, we develop custom reports and dashboards.
4. Optimize/extend
To help with ongoing improvements, our team will perform reviews and continually help you to optimize your network. Our goal is to help you get the maximum return on your investment and extend the reach of your cloud network. We do this by integrating all systems into OSS/BSS and other internal systems. Our team can help plan for capacity and performance infrastructure health checks, VNF troubleshooting, design review, capacity planning, and reporting. To be sure your investments are working, we can integrate TCO with NOC and operations frameworks. Much of this is achieved using custom probe development to create closed-loop automation and allowing for streamlined deployment and scalability.
We can create a policy-based end-to-end automated service delivery. We also enable service orchestration that can dynamically provision workload and manage an entire end-to-end system, thus achieving your business outcomes or use cases.
With telco cloud automation, we can set policies and dynamically adjust the type of service to provide customers to enable you to monetize different characteristics of the provided services. For instance, VMware Telco Cloud Automation service tool automates the service delivery through network slicing. This of course can all be done within the whole ecosystem of partners like Ericsson, Nokia and others to seamlessly integrate into any network.
VMware expertise
As service providers transform into digital service providers, they must find partners with philosophies that align with their own. Building software-driven, cloud-empowered, multivendor-ready, innovation-enabling environments is much more easily done with partners with roots in those areas. VMware brings more than 20 years of virtualization excellence and software expertise to every customer project. With an intimate understanding of multi-cloud environments, VMware has experience thriving in a software-first economy and understands how to build value-added digital services. Service providers value VMware’s proven history of delivering digital technologies to accelerate IT and network operations. Our team of experts is ready to work with you to help you thrive through this digital transformation.
To learn more about these steps and others ways to transform your network, download our Telecom Modernization eBook or contact our sales team today.
