Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:12):
Hi, I'm Tony Poulos from TelecomTV and today I'd like to deep dive into the world of cloud native telcos and to help me out, I have me today Kailem Anderson, who is the VP and GM of Global Products and Delivery at Blue Planet, a division of Ciena. Welcome, Kailem. Now let's start with the basics. What is the definition of a cloud native telco and what capabilities are necessary for telcos to be truly cloud native?

Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (00:41):
Yeah, so I think this is actually a really good starting question. There can be confusion in the market as to what is cloud native. I look at it through three lenses, right? So the first one is how is cloud native broadly defined in the market? How is it defined in the telecom industry? And then how do I give you my perspective, deal with it being an automation or OSS vendor? So let's look at it in the broader context. Cloud native refers to this concept of building and running applications that take advantage of distributed computing offered by cloud delivery models, right? Cloud native apps are designed with a certain set of traits in mind. They want to exploit the scale elasticity, resiliency, flexibility that the cloud provides. If you step back and then say, well, what does this mean for a telco? What are key principles of cloud native?

(01:28):
In a telco world? It really is embracing software principles. Microservices not monolithic is standards based, is open and programmable can be deployed in any cloud that the telco chooses, public or private, and then leverages cloud technologies like Kubernetes. Now, if I look at it through the automation vendor lens, which is the space that I'm in, what do we mean by cloud native? It's really deployable in any cloud, including on-prem, and it can be consumed if deemed as a SaaS. It should be portable, meaning you can move from one cloud to another and it should be elastic, meaning it can scale out based on capacity or demand.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:06):
Why should CSPs make this transition and how do cloud native architecture and technologies help telcos in OSS modernization?

Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (02:15):
Yeah, so I think the first thing to debunk here is that firstly, CSPs have already made this transition to public cloud. It's well adopted in telecom. So for example, today if you look at Blue Planet and now OSS workloads, roughly 75 to 85% of them are actually deployed on the public cloud, whether that's Amazon, Azure, or GCP. So given this adoption, if telcos are really going to get the benefits of public cloud, then they need to ensure their software stacks are built to embrace the value that cloud brings. Just doing a lift and shift of legacy OSS software to the cloud, I would say, brings incremental value. At best. What we want to do is deploy a modernized software stack that's open programmable microservices base that can scale out on demand and be portable from one cloud to the next. That brings real value to the telco. How does it help the telco? I think two things it does. Firstly, it reduces operational cost through simplified integration automation via standard skill sets, embracing common CICD based models. The second one is it provides flexibility by being able to participate in a broader cloud ecosystem, explicitly CSPs can create and deliver innovative digital services more quickly, leveraging cloud principles. Essentially it can accelerate their time to market.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:30):
How are you seeing CSPs progress in their journey to cloud native OSS?

Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (03:36):
Yeah, so I think the first thing to flag is the BSS layer, which is the layer that usually sits above OSS transformed a few years ago. But for the OSS domain, it is still, I consider early days, right? I mentioned before OSS workloads are deployed on the public cloud, roughly 75 to 85% of them. But the challenge is many of these workloads have just been lift and shifted, right? They're legacy systems. They haven't really embraced cloud principles, meaning they're not cloud native. I think the one area where progress has been made significantly is 5G, right? 5G sort of mandates cloud native. They sort of go hand in hand. Now it's about adapting these principles to other domains in terms of inhibitors to this OSS shift cloud native. I think to make this transformation to cloud native work, it requires both IT and network operation skillsets, and it really requires a change in how the telco manages the application.

(04:33):
Firstly, it needs to bring in cloud skillset that are software centric, and then with bringing in understandings of things like microservices and Kubernetes. The second thing that's really important, as I mentioned before, this move to CI CD based principles. If you're embracing cloud but still implementing waterfall processes, then you're not really gaining the benefits that cloud can bring in terms of speed and agility. So this shift requires, I think a relook or a re-imagining of the people, the processes and the tools to truly embrace the value of cloud. And I think it's fair to say that telcos are in the middle of this journey now. They haven't completed it. They're sort of finding their way through it.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:10):
Why is it imperative for CSPs to modernize their OSS now? What challenges do they encounter when they embark on the modernization journey?

Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (05:19):
Yeah, this is a really good question, and let's first acknowledge where OSS is, right? OSS is this middle area between the BSS and the network that will enable them better to monetize their network, but also modernize their operating processes. So the best analogy I can use is if a telco has modernized their BSS layer, but not their OSS layer, then all really they've achieved is delivering a good experience on the front end in terms of how the customer interacts with the telco. But if the OSS isn't optimized, then those slow processes around how a service gets delivered or fulfilled, how it gets provisioned, how it gets operationalized will still exist, and that's a real problem. So if you draw the analogy 15 years ago, telco customers were willing to wait, say two to six months for a circuit to be delivered, right? That doesn't cut the mustard in today's world, right?

(06:12):
In a 5G Edge IOT based world, they expect instant gratification and a service to be turned up immediately. So if your OSS can't work in real time, it can't deliver elastic based services in real time, and the fulfillment process is still poor and slow leading to bad customer experience, then what have you done? What have you really transformed? And the reality is that legacy OSS solutions that were customized for a particular service 15 to 20 years ago, they're outdated for this real time world. So my view is that through this modernization, through this shift of OSS to cloud native operational silos need to be eliminated. This world of spaghetti integration that has existed between the BSS, the OSS and the network domains needs to be eliminated through open digital architectures and NAS based principles. And cloud native is really at the foundation of driving that shift. The other key piece, which you mentioned key challenges that are encountered on this modernization journey. I think the first one is taking a software first approach, leveraging software and not doing things the old way, which was about delivering service toolkits and customizations. If you take that old paradigm, try and apply it to a cloud native world, it won't work. Those old principles are 20 years old. You need to shift to a software-centric model to really embrace cloud and get that portability and scalability that comes with cloud.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (07:39):
And most importantly, where has Blue Planet helped customers make this transition?

Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (07:45):
So firstly, blue Planet's invested really heavily in cloud native, both from a vision and from a broader portfolio execution perspective so that we can deploy on any cloud that the Telco chooses, whether that's public or private. We support all flavors of Kubernetes based cloud controllers. We're microservices based, open and programmable, and we're a big proponent of open standards. So we basically have the ability to deliver a modernized OSS experience across our suite as it relates to Telco's adoption of cloud OSS systems At Blue Planet, we're seeing real strengthening interest in terms of the NAS and CSPs opening up their IT stack to innovation. And we see this both in traditional wireline services, but we also see it in the mobile domain also. And we believe that NAS implementations of a cloud native services management layer that delivers open and standard based APIs and program ability and the adoption of common data models and service definitions is really where the industry is going.

(08:48):
For us, the starting point in any type of modernization journey is inventory. These inventory systems have around 20 years, and like we like to say is you can't automate what you can't see. And inventory is that starting journey, right? And a good example of where we are seeing this modernization is a customer like Lumen as an example, who very recently has embarked on a large inventory consolidation project where they've eliminated multiple legacy inventory systems within a two year via federated service inventory approach that's cloud native and sits on the public cloud. We're also seeing similar initiatives play out in the likes of Dish and Telefonica who are delivering modernized cloud native inventory systems as a single source of truth. I believe once you've sort of got that single source of truth layer right, then you can layer a cake in things like end-to-end orchestration via open digital architectures and NAS based principles.

(09:44):
You can orchestrate services via a common approach, whether that's wireline wireless, multi-cloud, or iot. And that's where Blue Planet has a full suite of orchestration products spanning multi-domain network orchestration, cloud native orchestration and service order management. Great example here of a transformation that's going on in the industry is what BT is doing, implementing a common services orchestration layer across their entire stack, whether that's a business service or a consumer service, and really driving a common experience and abstraction through their BSS layer into the network layer via intent. The final piece in this transformation, as I like to say, is sun setting old or legacy services assurance systems, and a lot of these systems are almost as old as the inventory systems. These legacy systems aren't cloud native. Furthermore, they can't even really be lift and shifted into the cloud either. So we're seeing the sun setting of these services assurance systems accelerate considerably.

(10:43):
For me, the goal in the services assurance modernization space is deliver next generation AI ops space fault performance and predictive analytics systems, again, embracing these cloud native principles that allow the environment to scale out based on demand and allow it to be portable from one cloud to the other. My view is with that third phase, it then allows you to deliver on this end-to-end vision of cloud native OSS, which is really focused on delivering closed loop operation back into the network. In a true declarative model, I think this is where our customers want to go. This is where the vision of cloud native OSS can take you as a step function if you sort of implement it in pieces with that end state of really driving closed loop.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (11:36):
Thanks Kailem for giving us the background and the insights into what it means to become a truly cloud native Telco. Thank you.

Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (11:44):
Thank you for your time.