Telco Managed Services Get High Tech

Professional services and systems integration have traditionally been a major revenue driver for telecom infrastructure vendors and is the established model for nationwide network rollouts for the past decade. The managed services market isn’t without its problems though: in many cases, network infrastructure vendors are required to on-board thousands of employees from the host operator organization, leading to a very large workforce that may be made redundant when the rollouts are complete. This has been the case with all vendors worldwide, who have made thousands of managed services employees redundant when hitting financial turmoil.

However, managed services are now changing and are not the domain of simple systems integration, or managing a hardware-driven network. Many new elements and concepts are introduced – these were highlighted by Nokia in its latest Services Analyst Days conference in London:

1. Robotics and automation: handling equipment alarms and fault management.
2. Customer-centric operations: improving Service Quality Management and introducing new ways to improve user experience, for example Geolocation as a Service.
3. Innovation: using company innovations to improve services, e.g., Nokia’s AVA cognitive services platform that crowdsources network data to produce a 98% accuracy rate in identifying network anomalies.

These are a few examples of new, non-telco technologies revolutionizing the way managed services are implemented. At the same time, the reason managed services are being sold is also changing.

Managed services are no longer about installing hardware and making sure the connections between proprietary boxes and their control software (OSS) works. Today’s – and tomorrow’s – networks are mostly driven by software, virtualization and are evolving in the cloud native domain, where network elements can move between data centers and grow according to demand. It is still early stages when considering multi-vendor compatibility, sharing the carrier-grade cloud infrastructure as a common platform and consolidating network control into a single orchestrator or even very few OSS tools. It is almost certain that telcos cannot perform these tasks alone – bar a few Tier-1 exceptions, including AT&T, China Mobile, and Telefonica who are currently attempting to do so.

For the rest of the telcos around the world, it’s vendor managed services and systems integration that will enable telco cloud deployments and allow them to become more agile for service delivery. Cognitive analytics, AI, natural language processing, crowd sourcing network incidents, use-case driven network improvements, devops processes and many more managed services enhancements are becoming necessary to manage the complex networks, that also need to include legacy networks. This new expertise is potentially giving Tier-1 vendors a new status. 

Tier-1 vendors are gathering new types of expertise on running today’s networks and have no choice but to centralize analytics, processing and automation capabilities. For example, Nokia is centralizing its network management platform – called AVA – and has even launched a virtual assistant for network operators, called MIKA, that uses crowd-sourced data from all networks Nokia operates. This is well beyond the reach of any telco that operates in the world today. In fact, these handful of Tier-1 vendors may become network operators themselves, selling Network as a Service capability to telcos that own the last mile. We have already experienced network operators offloading physical assets and extending this model to the core network may allow vendors to create a new cost structure that is more efficient and profitable for the future.

One thing is for certain: the advanced level of managed services being discussed at the moment is creating new types of opportunity for infrastructure vendors and may create completely new deployment types for telcos, especially as the industry moves to 5G.