Intelligent automation outperforms costly, labor-intensive and manual processes, making a provision for remediation and delivering enhanced network performance. In an interview with Telecom Review Asia, Ricky Boyle, senior vice president, business development, B-Yond, delved deep into the importance of network automation and how operators can meet SLAs in today’s hyper-connected world.
Can you tell us about the importance of network automation for operators when navigating a fast-evolving digital landscape?
Essentially, the complexity of the network is accelerating. With growing network demands, network automation is important across the board to ensure a standard of service that meets what we're accustomed to in the past, much less to meet the requirements of our customers moving into the future and unleash the full potential of network assets.
How can operators meet new SLA requirements?
Many elements come into play — everything from better data curation, which is useful for many use cases, to the concept of end-to-end solutions. We've historically been managing our networks in a very verticalized way, whether it's core versus access or fixed versus wireless. However, we have to look across all layers, from application, service and network to the infrastructure, especially as more services migrate to the cloud. Most operators do not fully understand the implications that operating in the cloud has on their services. And so these are some of the key elements and issues that we have to address to meet more stringent SLAs as we navigate a more complex and yet more versatile network environment.
How does B-Yond facilitate transformation?
We assess where operators are today in their evolution, and we bring some of our IP and assets to help bridge gaps and address issues such as automated root cause analysis, fallouts and failures in labs or production to yield network service delivery optimization. And we also bring elements of partnerships to the ecosystem to drive automation at scale.
What is the outlook for network automation in APAC?
Asia Pacific is a leader in innovation in many ways. As a region, APAC embraces the ecosystem concept, where you bring together many partners to collaborate. Asia, in particular, is very advanced when it comes to adopting ecosystems to yield shared successes. With these ecosystems, operators bring in other elements into their network partnerships — applications and service providers — to provide a verticalized solution for customers. As a result, network complexity is further compounded, and this makes driving end-to-end automation even more critical in the region.
