NaaS enables CSPs to broaden their digital ecosystems and capture network API-driven revenue
Enterprises want to consume network services the way they utilize cloud resources, with self-service options and rapid service activation at the click of a button. According to ABI’s 2022 Enterprise Opportunities in Network-as-a-Service Adoption report, more than 90% of enterprises will consume at least 25% of their network services as a usage-based consumption model by 2030. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are targeting these shifting enterprise demands, pushing harder than ever to find new revenue by delivering services with greater speed and agility.
To that end, many CSPs have Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) in their sights. NaaS enables CSPs to broaden their digital ecosystems and capture network Application Programming Interface (API)-driven revenue with high-value on-demand services for their enterprise customers. In fact, the NaaS market is forecast to exceed $100 billion over the next five years.
Winning with NaaS
What happens after customers click that order button? How are services provisioned on-demand? The only way to enable modern network services on demand is by overcoming the limitations of traditional operations support systems (OSS) – highly customized solutions using proprietary interfaces which rely on manual, error prone processes. In these legacy systems, service-related operations are tightly integrated with the underlying network, limiting service agility and network innovation – two compulsory requirements for NaaS.
The complexity of new dynamic network services demands a cloud-native, API-first approach, where different functions and operations can be decomposed and integrated seamlessly. Industry organizations like MEF, Linux Foundation, TM Forum, and GSMA have promoted prescriptive APIs, which help create standardized, end-to-end service delivery frameworks as a central component of modern OSS.
NaaS decouples the service layer from business and network layers, supporting automated service activation end-to-end across network domains and technologies. By leveraging open APIs between these layers, operational silos and the need for proprietary integrations are eliminated, providing CSPs with a more flexible and vendor agnostic operating environment with the ability to scale on demand.
We’re already seeing a lot of success in the market by leveraging APIs in cloud-native, modern OSS to start monetizing with NaaS.
BT Group, replaced more than half a dozen legacy service orchestration systems and adopted a cloud-native approach to service order management and orchestration that adheres to the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture. When a customer requests or modifies a consumer or business service, Blue Planet automates the design, orchestration, configuration, and activation.
Lumen is modernizing operations to enable a private connectivity fabric, allowing enterprise and cloud customers to access Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) to address their dynamic AI capacity needs. They are starting with a consolidation of inventory systems, using unified, clean and accurate data as the foundation for their transformation.
The role of data
Traditional OSS metrics focus on technical performance indicators, like uptime and latency, rather than real-time customer experience, leading to situations where the network appears healthy but individual customers can still suffer poor service. This is why CSPs looking to deliver NaaS are shifting from a network operations center (NOC) mindset to a service operations center (SOC) perspective, emphasizing not only network health but service quality and customer experience. The key to enabling this transition is accurate, real-time inventory data.
Network and service inventory data is often siloed and fragmented across different systems, driving error-prone manual processes that slow time to market and make it difficult to correlate network events with customer impact and to prioritize resources effectively. Without a unified, end-to-end view of both network resources and service performance, CSPs might struggle to deliver proactive, customer-centric experiences that NaaS promises. Multi-vendor and multi-domain OSS based on the foundation of accurate inventory data is helping to overcome this challenge.
Inventory data underpins the entire service lifecycle in NaaS, from order capture, resource planning to service provisioning, activation, and assurance. An accurate, unified inventory coupled with real-time assurance enables proactive identification of anomalies, congestion and potential failures, allowing for swift intervention before customers are affected. Real-time analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven insights will support automation of network configurations and resource allocation.
AI’s impact on NaaS
5G network slicing, SD-WAN automation, and BoD are all traditional NaaS use cases that leverage automation to optimize the design, provisioning and assurance of services in multi-vendor, multi-domain environments. Introducing AI into these processes is helping to accelerate time to market.
There is a myriad of ways AI is playing an important role in modern OSS, but one we see often is when AI predictions can be used for proactive 5G slice resource management and automated modeling based on design documents. Intent-based orchestration capabilities are also being augmented with AI-driven service qualification, service template generation from natural language input, and in-flight order assessment using AI. Blue Planet has been vocal about these AI impacts, and we anticipate more coming down the pike.
NaaS saw early adoption from CSPs looking to deliver services on-demand, and it continues to gain momentum as operators seek to tap into the monetization opportunities afforded by network APIs. This unique ability to modernize operations and integrate AI into the automation process positions NaaS as the foundation for strategic ‘telco to techco’ transformation initiatives.
