The News: Hansen Technologies is prioritizing its portfolio development and partnership strategy to support key TM Forum standards and initiatives such as Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and TM Forum 921 intent management application programming interface (API) to drive communications service provider (CSP) readiness in building autonomous networks and optimizing AI capabilities. Read the blog on the Hansen website.
Hansen: Ready for ODA and Pacing CSP Innovation
Analyst Take: Hansen’s portfolio development and partnership approach is focused on ensuring that its CSP customers can mobilize their commercial operations to respond swiftly to market shifts and evolving customer demand. Integral to Hansen’s strategy of unleashing commercial agility is making it easier for CSPs to capitalize on commercial opportunities across the digital marketplace by streamlining innovation in selling new services and market offerings as well as enabling new 5G-IoT business models that fully accord with industry standards and best practices.
From my view, Hansen is making the portfolio development moves and forming the partnerships required to cultivate customer-centric service offerings that are sold and fulfilled according to both consumer and enterprise customer needs. Hansen’s strategic approach aligns with the topmost industry themes, further crystallized at DTW23, that CSPs are prioritizing to advance their digital transformation journeys toward techco status. The two topmost themes include autonomous networks and AI.
Hansen Catalog has already attained Ready for ODA status from the TM Forum, providing the enterprise product and technical service catalog application that can boost Hansen’s ability to meet growing CSP demand for greater commercial agility, including through intent-based interconnection of products. The status is important at enabling Hansen to capture nascent mindshare as the TM Forum’s ODA provides a standardized cloud-native enterprise architecture for CSPs, vendors, and systems integrators to cohesively accelerate digital connectivity by creating services and products more swiftly and cost-effectively.
Autonomous Networks Rising
I find that CSPs are expanding their assessment of autonomous network capabilities with the goal of configuring, monitoring, and maintaining operations and business processes with increased independence and automation. As a result, AI and intent-driven capabilities are becoming integral to attaining more efficient management of the intricacies of modern networks.
Through autonomous networks, CSPs can flexibly leverage open source software, use unlimited storage resources, enhance analytics, and scale the dynamic connections and embedded sensors key to advancing the digital experience as well as improving business outcomes.
I find that Hansen’s collaboration with Cognizant to advance the TM Forum Zero-touch Digital Marketplace (Phase V) platform closely aligns with the strategic autonomous network objectives of CSPs. This includes providing a cross-industry platform that can enable use cases such as smart spaces, facility management, smart healthcare, sports, and gaming, underpinned by quality of services (QoS) metrics that guarantee performance.
Specifically, built on the Cognizant ODA framework (CODA), which accords with the TM Forum ODA using components from Hansen, STL, and NEC deployed in cloud-native manner on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hansen provides its Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) engine to support the Marketplace in the backend, enforcing all eligibility, compatibility, and serviceability rules configured in the Hansen Catalog, designed as the single source of truth, during the Order Capture phase.
By delivering AI-powered connectivity as a service (CaaS), the platform monitors for network anomalies and instigates self-healing mechanisms upon detecting disruption patterns. If an issue arises and the network degrades to outside the service level agreement (SLA), the network automatically provisions the required resources to rapidly restore performance. With Hansen Catalog as a core component, such service attributes can be fully modeled and expressed through the TM Forum 921 intent management API that integrates with AI engines to further enable the autonomous management of network performance.
Plus, the Hansen Advanced Technical Orchestration and Fulfillment Management solution can ensure core and partner service activations follow rules and dependencies designed in the Product Catalog, reducing the risk of order fallout, maintaining revenue margins, and safeguarding customer relations.
AI Readiness
2023 is the year of AI and the telecom market is no exception. This includes CSPs requiring clean, consistent data for optimizing AI capabilities across commercial environments. As such, CSPs, particularly top-tier CSPs, will prioritize owning their own AI/machine learning (ML) systems, including the adoption of enterprise systems that can smoothly integrate with their in-house AI/ML systems.
I see Hansen product offerings are External AI Ready, purpose developed for key business use case integrations, especially where its products interact with external AI models. Hansen is using a two-prong product development approach that consists of both increasing its product integration points with AI systems alongside building native AI capabilities into Hansen products including some targeting of Tier-2/Tier-3 CSPs that are unable to develop their own in-house AI/ML.
The Hansen Informatics platform can meet these emerging AI demands by feeding real-time event-based commercial and customer information into AI algorithms. For instance, Hansen CPQ can be integrated with Google’s recommendation engine to surface the most relevant products, services, and offers to customers. Additionally, through Hansen CPQ omnichannel capabilities, AI-driven enhanced selling capability can be replicated across any sales channel.
Key Takeaway: Hansen ODA Readiness Paves the Way for CSP Digital Innovation
Overall, I believe that the Hansen Ready for ODA portfolio can play an integral role in paving the way for the CSP journey from telco to techco. By aligning with TM Forum’s ODA standard as well as other key initiatives such as Zero-touch Digital Marketplace and TM Forum 921 intent management API, Hansen fulfills the burgeoning CSP demand to build autonomous networks and use AI to deliver new digital services that compellingly augment customer experiences and improve business outcomes.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
