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REAL-TIME, TRANSPARENT CONTROL The end goal of a successful network transformation is to give customers control of how they can manage and control your capabilities to meet their needs. Network services, especially transmission based, used to be deliberately hidden from the customer. Yes, they could see the interface we provided to them, they could certainly see the complex order forms and contracts we put in front of them, but that was the limit to our transparency. How our network was routed, configured, managed, maintained, repaired and what performance it provided was hidden inside our systems and processes. If it failed, they could always report the fault and we would fix it, but we essentially designed our networks for ourselves and let the customers use them. A transformed programmable network is the complete opposite. Connectivity should be a capability that we offer, one that is easy to establish, easy to change, transparent in its operation and billed as it is used, in real-time. Although our vendors are keen to support the move to software defined networks, and some provide APIs to enable their control via an orchestration layer, they are always interested in selling their components and systems if possible. Having control of that orchestration layer, and being able to establish services as required across both new equipment and the legacy infrastructure components, is a key step towards an efficient and cost effective approach. In reality, we must start with what we have in place and put our focus into creating an orchestration layer, APIs and portals that we design ourselves in many cases, to make all these disparate components work as one, transparently and in real-time.
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When we achieve this, the customers will be able to take their rightful place at the center of our network evolution. CREATING FLEXIBILITY AND EFFICIENCY THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS With this in place we can give customers flexibility and efficiency. To deliver this, we need to enable capacity increases on-demand (and via a portal or API) and billing that matches that usage so it ties their operating cost to their revenue. With that approach, we can migrate them to pay for usage services that fully meet their needs. With a portal like the one designed by Epsilon, known as Infiny, the provisioning of services in real-time is the core to the solution, and is the future of networking. This opens up a wider opportunity: The creation of global solutions via partners rather than on your own. As the world is getting more complex, no-one can build networks to every conceivable place that a customer may need or include every function it may require. Often, carriers have built deeply into certain regions and so end to end services based on automated network interoperability through APIs can expand the reach of those solutions in a very cost effective way. This is made possible by utilizing the capabilities of partners to reach areas of the world that currently, perhaps, don’t justify a network build. In effect, this could enable a capex light way to serve customer needs, which allows the solution to scale until it becomes financially justifiable to expand the footprint with a new network build. The key is enabling the overall platform to provide the services on-demand and flexibly to meet those end customer needs. This means partnering both at the network and service level when it makes sense.
