With the onset of the 5G and cloud era, customers, devices and applications are becoming increasingly more mobile and, perhaps more importantly, portable. As end-users can now move their devices and services more easily from one network provider to another, service experience has become a critical metric for network operator success. However, there are several factors that impact overall service experience, including sales, contract plans, billing and support. Yet, perhaps the most critical factor is the service delivery platform or the network itself.
The network plays a crucial role in service experience and customer satisfaction. As such, how the network is designed and managed influences customer perception of several service experience metrics, including service fidelity or quality of experience, availability, time to value and of course, security.
These key performance indicators (KPIs) will have a significant impact on customer confidence and loyalty, which will influence network operators’ ability to maintain their customer base, attract new customers and most importantly, generate new revenue. This new revenue may come from service upgrades, expanding services to new sites, or cross selling the customer into new service offerings.
With this in mind, we can see why it is essential for network operators not just to keep pace with customer expectations but where possible, exceed them. However, as our industry transitions to 5G and cloud, the scale and complexity of network architectures, their related solutions and customer expectations for reliability and performance are increasing, not decreasing. As network operators look to transform the way they plan, build and operate their networks and services, many are looking to network automation solutions for help.
Network automation solutions help simplify network management and service provisioning while delivering relevant business outcomes like expanded service availability, faster time to value, increased service quality, service assurance and security. Yet while some network operators are taking an automation-led approach, the deployment and management of automation for all their networks and services across the entire lifecycle requires a broad set of capabilities, including:
Device Lifecycle Management – Deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and management of the devices in the network, and ensuring that devices remain compliant to network operator configuration specifications
Service Lifecycle Management – Service planning, modeling, design, deployment, mapping, monitoring and updating.
Network and Service Health Assurance – Collecting data from the network, and analyzing it to provide critical insights regarding network service and performance behavior. Advanced requirements in this area include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to provide anomaly detection, predictive analytics and root cause analysis to deliver closed-loop remediation in a make-before-break manner.
Transport management – This simplifies the management of network resources. Requirements in this category focus on planning and analysis in addition to the network resource and traffic management. These capabilities enable network operators to make greater use of the network resources they have and thus improve their overall ROI.
With these requirements in mind, Juniper Networks, in partnership with Anuta Networks, has developed an automation portfolio to help network operators increase operational efficiency, improve network service resiliency and reliability and deliver service assurance to internal and external end-customers.
Please watch for our next blog in this series, which will focus on the key components of the Juniper Networks automation portfolio. We’ll also provide an overview of Anuta ATOM and share how network operators can leverage Juniper’s expanded portfolio to simplify network operations, increase operational efficiency and improve service assurance for a better customer experience.
If you would like to learn more about Juniper Networks’ Automation Portfolio, please visit our website at www.juniper.net/automation.
