Keeping Pace with the Demand on Orchestration Infrastructure
The cross-domain orchestration market has been comprised predominantly of development-heavy platforms and open source software frameworks. Subsequently, most orchestration initiatives have required significant investments in professional services and software expertise to deploy and maintain, diminishing business value by increasing total-cost-of-ownership and extending program durations unnecessarily.
New technologies and capabilities such as multi-cloud and the move to containerized network functions are becoming available at a rate that far surpasses the rate that IT integration teams and standard bodies can accommodate. Orchestration systems that are hard coded to specific technologies and standards limit the ability of service providers to innovate. The size and scope of the service provider infrastructure and the explosive growth in the rate of change in that infrastructure places heavy demand on cross-domain orchestration platforms for availability, performance, and scalability. Development-heavy frameworks are struggling to keep pace while the costs to develop and maintain them continue to grow.
White Paper: Cross-Domain Network Orchestration with Itential
Itential’s Unique Approach to Cross-Domain Automation & Orchestration
The Itential Automation Platform is based on a fundamentally unique approach to cr0ss-domain automation and orchestration and was designed with the vision of the future telecom network –a cloud-centric, multi-domain, multi-vendor, multi-technology network environment with programmability at every level, one that enables service providers to dynamically offer high-value, emergent services with optimal performance at a minimal operating cost. To achieve this vision, Itential created a new type of orchestration platform based on the following principles:
Rapid Integration Capabilities
The Itential Automation Platform enables rapid integration, that can be performed by end users in minutes, eliminating costly integration efforts and enabling new, more robust, orchestration use cases. This capability has enabled Itential to become the platform of choice for service providers who wish to bring new services and capabilities to market quickly.
Flexibility & Accessibility
The Itential Automation Platform is built on a true low-code paradigm, not only for creation of integrations but also for designing of automation/orchestration workflows and activities such as payload data transformation and policy design/execution. Activities that normally take time and effort to develop on other orchestration platforms, such as service task creation, are generated dynamically by Itential, saving significant time and further enabling rapid orchestration flow creation and management.
Ease of Use
Itential maintains an open-source repository of pre-built workflows and orchestrations that end users can deploy immediately, enabling a larger proportion of the technical community to participate directly in the development, testing, and operation of cross-domain orchestrations. Technical subject matter experts can work with tools and concepts that make it easy to translate their expertise into orchestrations.
Highly Scalable
The Itential Automation Platform is built on a modern technology stack designed to scale up to the largest networks in the world. The solution supports multiple deployment options to meet the needs of a diverse user community and has demonstrated the ability to perform more than 200 million automated transactions in one month in a production environment for a Tier 1 service provider. Additionally, Itential includes Pre-Built Automations and Integrations with most popular CI/CD tools, enabling Itential users to easily create orchestration CI/CD pipelines for greater scale and faster service introduction.
Business-Value Focused
The Itential Automation Platform provides visibility to the orchestration environment in real-time, enabling teams to define and track metrics that quantify the business value of the system. Organizations can measure and optimize their orchestrations to maximize the impact to the business.
Cross-Domain Orchestration Use Cases
Today the Itential Automation Platform is providing cross-domain orchestration in production networks including 4 of the top global wireless service providers and Tier 1 wireline/business service providers like Lumen for such use cases as:
- Enterprise wireless customer service activation and service lifecycle for 4G and 5G, including cross-domain orchestration of transport (TN) and Core domains.
- Cross-Domain orchestration for fixed access B2B and B2C across a range of fixed access technologies.
- Orchestration of 5G core instantiation.
- Orchestration of wireless edge, including edge site creation/lifecycle management, tenant placement and networking, and cloud network orchestration.
- Wireless transport network creation and day 2+ lifecycle for 4G and 5G.
- Mobile core (4G/5G) cross-domain orchestration.
- Orchestration of network migration and network evolution.
- TMF-compliant service orchestration for mobility services.
- Cross-domain network orchestration (mobile core, access, IP domains).
