Service orchestration for better service quality

Service orchestration is the process of designing, creating, delivering, and monitoring service offerings in an automated way. Service definitions created in the product catalog are taken right through the ordering process for fast and effective service orchestration.

In addition to 5G and service exposure, service orchestration is a key enabler for platform oriented operating models by enabling innovation with application developers and providers.

Many 5G use cases will be geographically distributed and technically diverse in terms of cloud environments, resulting in several different requirements from applications.

Service orchestration solutions must be capable of operating efficiently in increasingly hybrid and complex environments.

5G highlights how critical agility becomes for CSPs to be able to innovate using network capabilities in a simplified manner, to be more active and open in the partner ecosystem.

Service orchestration automates workflows toward zero touch order to activation

Take a strong position in the ecosystem, increase attractiveness as a business partner and deliver more value that goes beyond connectivity with innovative new services co-created with ecosystem partners.

Ensure service orchestration benefits the business by:

• Connecting to multiple application ecosystems and orchestrating workloads across multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments 
• Accelerating the introduction and delivery of services from months or days to minutes through agile service design and automated service management 
• Automating workload placements, service deployment and end-to-end (E2E) network slicing across central and edge sites to enable the monetization of new business opportunities

For new use cases around 5G, network slicing and edge, the telecom network needs an effective coordinating function which can plan, design and instantiate the offered and ordered services.

With several critical roles to fulfil, service orchestration:

• Provides network slice management including life cycle management and configuration by using standard templates
• Enables cross-domain orchestration across the network (RAN, Transport, and 5G Core) by interfacing with different domain managers and transport software defined networking (SDN) controllers.
• Provides multi-vendor and multi-cloud support with both built-in adaptors and a framework to create custom adaptors for special cases.

Telstra’s award winning (TM Forum Excellence) multi-domain service orchestration.

Central service monitoring enables closed loop automation for better service quality and customer satisfaction. Additionally, increased service visibility and resiliency improves customer experience and minimizes order fallouts which, if not dealt with efficiently, run the risk of negatively impacting the customer experience.

For superior service experiences the following need to be in place for effective service orchestration and service automation:

• E2E lifecycle management of network services from design, ordering, fulfilment to assurance
• Multi-domain network slice orchestration including RAN, core, and transport networks
• Common topology service providing full visibility of network statuses and resources

See more Business and Operations Support Systems cases.

Automation enables more efficient service orchestration of network and service workflows and processes. ​It is the only way to achieve the vision of zero-touch operations and it helps make networks programmable. Combining artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) with automation provides efficient and dynamic networks in a way that is not possible manually.​ This impacts the whole service lifecycle from design, through deployment and operation.​

Reduce time-to-market, reduce testing, improve order management, make order fulfilment more efficient and improve customer experience through closed loop automation. Coordinate and integrate automated tasks to:

• Optimize workflows of automated tasks across disparate systems​
• Support workloads running on both public and private clouds distributed across providers​
• Optimize available resources, placement of applications where capacity is needed on demand​
• Orchestrate network slices to be instantiated and life cycle managed based on dynamic consumer needs

Services for multiple industry segments demand enterprise service automation where the automation of key tasks, processes and workflows is critical to profitably scale enterprise business as complexity increases.

5G service automation: Key enablers