Telecom Italia Increases Efficiencies, Reduces Time to Market Through Network Automation & Orchestration with Itential
INDUSTRY
Communications Service Provider
GOALS
- Increase Visibility Across Network
- Enable Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Reduce Risk of Error
- Accelerate & Optimize Service Delivery
USE CASES
Software Upgrades
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Automated execution and validation of 100+ software upgrade processes.
Enabled end-to-end orchestration by abstracting the complexity of patchwork network systems with a single platform, increasing visibility.
Optimized collaboration between network administration and network services teams.
Reduced network service implementation costs.
Reduced manual errors with automation.
Manually Managed Network Leads to Configuration Errors & Confusion
TIM is the unique brand of the Telecom Italia Group that provides fixed and mobile telephony services, internet, digital content, and cloud services to over 100 million customers in Italy and Brazil. Faced with a huge networking dilemma, Telecom Italia has many departments involved in network service deliveries which led to many disparate systems of management, complex operational processes, and a long time to market with high implementation costs. Due to the intensive manual configuration tasks required for each requested service, they were vulnerable to errors and required a strong knowledge of network technologies that inhibited flexibility.
Working with a handful of different scripts and solutions, many of which were proprietary and known to very few people, every time they needed to make a change, they had to figure out which of these solutions to use and to ascertain who knew how to operate it. This caused confusion among their NetOps team and interfered with their ability to provide a seamless service to customers. Lacking an end-to-end view of services across departments, they needed a solution that could unify their disparate departments and provide a seamless orchestration layer across their various networks and tools.
In the old way of doing things, everything was its own little black box. We had to find ways to bring teams together, to speed things up from service request to delivery by making handoffs smoother.
Network Architect
Why They Chose Itential for Closed Loop Automation & Orchestration
Telecom Italia knew that they needed network automation, and more importantly a single touch point that connected all their cross departmental silos. Doing so would improve efficiency, simplify network management, and shorten their time to market.
They partnered with Itential to programmatically manage complex operational processes for software upgrades in a closed loop automation. Itential provides robust integration with Cisco NSO and together offer a single touch point for network automation that crosses departmental silos. Combined, these two platforms speak a language that TIMs operations, service, IT, and network management teams can all understand.
With Itential, they were able to automate the end-to-end process for all their software upgrades at scale through our:
- Deep integration and support for Cisco NSOand support for all network device technologies.
- Low-code workflowmanagement for maintenance automation, service order management, and configuration management.
- Pre-Built Integrations to more than 300 systemsand the ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems, to automate the full end-to-end process from service request to service completed.
- Automation of robust pre- and post-check process, log collection, MOP analytics for pre and post comparison, and final validation or optional rollback capabilities.
- Flexible operator interface for the activation and control of the upgrade services that enabled cross department participation in network automations.
The coupling of Cisco NSO + Itential offers great flexibility in building our automated services and at the same time transforming Telecom Italia’s department’s interaction, enforcing a business-oriented view.
Francesco Burgio, DevOps Engineer
Increased Efficiencies & Reduced Time to Market
With Itential and Cisco NSO, Telecom Italia no longer must deal with a patchwork of systems and technologies from various vendors when designing automated procedures. Instead, they now have an abstracted view of their entire network as the ability to abstract network layers further streamlines the way they deliver network services. Their network administration teams can now focus on managing their network infrastructure while their network service teams can concentrate on providing custom solutions to their clients, all through a single orchestration point.
Telecom Italia has realized such results with automated execution and validation of a 100+ task operational process for the delivery of software releases and Increased time to market of services from a singular upgrade process to multiple upgrades, including a reduction of manual errors. Their eventual goal is to use Itential and Cisco NSO to automate end-to-end network configuration within the IP and SDN enabled transport domain, eliminating all manual processes.
