The News: Nokia developed its Digital Operations Center to help communications service providers (CSPs) accelerate their journey toward autonomous service and network operation. Read the full blog on the Nokia website.
Nokia Makes Telecom Inventory Management Dynamic and Automatic
Analyst Take: Nokia’s Digital Operations Center is a modular solution composed of a common Unified Inventory, Orchestration Center, and Assurance Center. The combination is developed by Nokia to enable CSPs to manage the entire service lifecycle by designing, delivering, and ensuring services swiftly at scale. In essence, Nokia aims to make telecom inventory management dynamic as well as a key capability in advancing automation to decrease operation costs while rolling out new services faster alongside boosting revenue.
As foreground, traditional telecom inventory management solutions provide a comprehensive database tracking detailed information about physical and logical components, including cell towers, cables, switches, routers, antennas, and network devices. Today’s inventory solutions use a data-mesh approach to supersede traditional approaches, mapping end-to-end services to the physical network.
As such, capabilities such as root cause analysis (RCA), domain switching and correlation analysis for software configurations, network connections, and relationships between elements. Now inventory provides data aggregation, normalization, and network observability, serving as a single source of truth for operational support systems (OSS) and business processes in CSP environments.
The development of modern telecom inventory systems aligns with CSPs prioritizing the reduction in operational costs alongside rapidly implementing new services, such as 5G slicing, while improving and diversifying revenue. From my view, a dynamic and precise inventory system is essential to ensuring the successful automation of operations and business applications by using deep knowledge of network and services in tandem with real-time insights.
As a result, modern inventory solutions designed for autonomous networks must include observability, normalization, optimization, digital twins, and openness capabilities. For example, observability is integral to discovering existing and new network elements, including containerized, virtual, and physical ones, across swiftly evolving environments. This functionality includes creating the relational connections and graphs for these elements to provide the foundation for RCA in accord with processing by machine learning (ML) platforms and other automation systems.
Digital twins emulate network elements and their behaviors, enabling the definition and emulation of service impact. Combined with RCA, this approach can provide insights into the emerging state of the network, integral to intent-based networking designed for optimizing network operations and uptime by blending ML, AI, and orchestration on an automated basis.
Plus, I find that Nokia’s Digital Operations Center can provide disciplined processes and the automated inventory management key to eliminating error-prone manual processes. Through accurate inventory, CSPs can cultivate the intelligence integral to optimizing their security, policy, and compliance decisions. Also, by tracking usage patterns, CSPs can gain insights into how services can be adjusted and optimized to gain improved cost savings.
Key Takeaway: Nokia’s Digital Operation Center Delivers Modern Inventory Readiness
Overall, I believe Nokia’s Digital Operations Center can enable CSPs to manage the entire service lifecycle by designing, delivering, and ensuring services, such as 5G slicing, at scale with rapidity. Now CSPs can fulfill SLAs on a more automated and intelligent basis as well as more efficiently abstract the intricacies of the underlying network to expose its capabilities to OSS and business processes on an IBN framework.
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.
