Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Hello, you are watching the Digital Support Systems Summit, part of our year round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels, and today's discussion looks at the issues around deploying NextGen OSS and BSS on the public cloud. What are the technology and business drivers behind this move? What additional support capabilities does the public cloud offer to telcos? And is there any value in creating a unified cloud-based layer? Well, to answer these questions and more, I am joined on the program today by Ling Li deng director researcher at China Mobile, and also vice chair of the Etsi NFV Solutions group. Amir Mehmood, director of Solution Engineering for Optiva, and Andy Tiller, EVP of Member Products and Services with TM Forum. Hello everyone. It's really good to see you all. Thanks so much for taking part in today's discussion. So first of all, I'd like to ask why should telcos even consider deploying their OSS and BSS on the public cloud? What are the benefits? Amir, can we perhaps start with you and get your thoughts on this?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (01:48):
Yeah, so I think telcos, like many other commerce and entertainment industries must consider the benefits that the public cloud offers. O-S-S/B-S-S systems are critical IT systems and they're often the best candidates for quickly moving to the public cloud because they are sitting more in the data plane, sorry, in the control plane. Whereas some of the other network elements which are sitting in the data plane are comparatively harder to move because there's a lot of bandwidth and back and forth involved. And public cloud surely brings a lot of benefits like scalability, flexibility, effectiveness, you can benefit from the investments that these hyperscalers are doing in terms of security and compliances, et cetera, et cetera. So these are all the benefits and we have seen most telecom operators have started the journey already, at least in the North America, in Europe, almost all operators have some assets on the public cloud and the rest of the world is also following. Yep,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:59):
Great. Thanks very much for that introduction, em, we've been following the telcos moving to the public cloud for some time now on telecom tv and this is all part of this transformation. So Andy, lemme come across to you. What are you seeing at Team Forum and one of the benefits that you advocate for such a move?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (03:19):
Well, I think Amir is right that the industry has decided that public cloud is a safe environment and is now really getting engaged with the big hyperscale cloud platform providers. The involvement of Microsoft and Google and AWS and other public cloud platform providers in TM forums. Work has increased greatly over the last three or four years or so as those big hyperscalers have seen the opportunity in the telecoms market. And I think from the point of view of the operators service providers that are migrating to public cloud, it's not just about cost efficiencies and other the traditional benefits of moving to the cloud, public cloud, but it's also about access to the skills and expertise of the hyperscalers, particularly in AI because now a lot of OSS and BSS is being automated through the use of ai and more recently gen AI as well as machine learning and other predictive analytic techniques and the hyperscalers really are bringing a lot of technology that can be plugged in and a lot of expertise in how to use it. So I think that as much as anything now is really driving the relationship between the telcos and the hyperscalers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:46):
Great. Thanks very much Andy. Amir, let's come back to you because I know you want to pick up on some additional thoughts there.

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (04:54):
So just to add to what Andy just pointed out, I think public cloud is more of an ecosystem. I don't want to look at these three big players, but it's basically they're enabling a whole ecosystem where there are modern tools coming up using all of these different technologies, analytics, ai, data management, gen ai, they're almost, a lot of them are only available in public cloud, but they're always optimized to run in public cloud. So people may think that we can run those tools in private cloud, but cloud, they're not designed and they're not optimized for private cloud operations. And that's what I think will be a key differentiator. Those operators who are adapting to the public cloud will benefit from these ecosystem third party systems and the others will lag behind.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:45):
Interesting. Amir, thanks so much for that. We've heard that assumption before over the past few years. It's interesting that we bring that up now. It's good. Okay, so we talked about benefits, but how should Tecos actually go about this process? Because as we've just heard, I assume that shifting legacy software across is not the perfect answer and that we need to take more of a cloudnative approach here that would appear to be an important element. Andy, what's your advice to telcos? How should they go about this move?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (06:15):
Well, you're absolutely right. That lift and shift on its own doesn't really bring the benefits of using the public cloud. Of course there may be some cost benefits for large scale operations and the ability to scale up and down as needed and those sort of traditional things associated with the public cloud platforms. But I think really lift and shift doesn't give you the full benefits of a cloud native environment. And our industry has been migrating towards cloud native for quite a while now. Most OSS and BSS systems on the market are microservices based and designed for deployment in, for instance, containerized modules on Kubernetes platforms and so on, running in public cloud or private cloud. So the shift to cloud native has been happening in TM forum. What we're very keen to encourage the industry to do is to go cloud native together rather than everybody doing their own flavor.

(07:25):
The tools you need and the ways of working have been quite well established now, but in our industry, unlike the big hyperscalers who have tens of thousands of software developers all working to the same standards and company approaches in our industry, all of our systems and processes are built from many different parties. So multiple software vendors and system integrators and in-house systems. And so if everybody goes about cloud native migration in their own way, that will still lead to a lot of customization, a lot of future legacy to maintain. So we've been developing with our members the open digital architecture ODA, which is a blueprint for the industry to go cloud native together and it provides some standards, not just the open APIs which are now widely adopted, but also the actual specifications of the software building blocks and the abstracted environment in which they run, which we call the ODA canvas. So that's something which has very wide scale support from CSPs, also from our software vendor members and now the hyperscalers who all have their own ODA canvas.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:42):
Good to hear. Thanks very much. Andy Lingli, let's come across to you now because if a lift and shift approach doesn't work and a more cloud native approach is required, as you've just heard, there's different ways of going this and telco's got to ensure that it takes the right approach. What's your thoughts on how telcos should go about this move?

Lingli Deng, China Mobile/ETSI (09:03):
Yes, I think going cloud native is actually a new change towards software development and thanks to TM Forum's collaboration platform, we are now actually also in the process of making the ISS and BSS going to collabor native. And especially for these highly customized software system like these supporting systems, I believe that going to cloud native could effectively reduce the development and also the operation costs for these software systems. However, I would also like to point it out that adopting cloud native paradigm does not mean that we have to also move to a public cloud deployment pattern for CSPs, I think especially in my opinion, they need to choose between private, public or hybrid cloud deployment patterns according to their own requirements and also taking into consideration about the local regulation requirements as well. So for example, right now we can see that for some areas around the globe, while the regulation requirements are not that strict, especially for data, there are cases emerging calibration between CSPs with public cloud services type scalers, they're collaborating with OSS and BSS software deployment and even including data and analytics collaboration.

(10:56):
And it is quite advanced and very aggressive I would say. But if this pattern is also applicable to other sales PS or would be prevail in the near future, I think it is still yet to be seen because as I said earlier, the regulations for data management and also service assurance requirements and especially the cost and efficiency like factors actually all needs to be taken into consideration when sales base are choosing the deployment pattern for their OSS and basis systems, even their now cloud native paradigm. And I think for the form two data and service guarantee, these two factories are quite easily comprehended. But for cost and also efficiency factors, there is I think hidden costs from moving into public cloud that are usually hidden by their technical advantages is that by moving into public cloud deployment, it usually means extra cost that needs to be covered in terms of data transmission because you need to transfer your data from your local spots to hype to the public cloud, the data center usually at a remote location there is cost for these data transition and there is also an integration of different processes and also collaboration between different operational teams because public cloud operations stuff and CSP operations stuff needs to collaborating together and these are all the costs that needs to be taken care of.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:00):
Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. We have a whole day of finops later in the year as part of our cloud native summit if we feel that's a really important area we need to do more work on. And as you say, every telco has its unique set of considerations here. Amir, let me come across to you because you'd like to pick up, I think on some of those comments.

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (13:21):
So basically I kind of agree with lingli and this is exactly the discussions that we have been having with all of our clients in the last five years or so, but I think there are two key aspects to be discussed here. So first of all, public cloud benefits outweigh the kind of, let's say regulatory conditions because as I said, the ecosystem that is enabled on the public cloud, the kind of services and applications which are available on the public cloud are not available on the private cloud. And secondly, the way Optiva has dealt with this, and I think there are other vendors doing the same stuff as well, but I think our journey has been that we are kind of advocating cloud optimized. So our BSS and OSS software is optimized for cloud. While it is cloud native, it can run on a private cloud and public cloud.

(14:16):
In the same way we are trying to reduce the dependencies to basically move the same application from a private cloud to a public cloud, kind of a hybrid deployment where we can have a production on-prem if the local regulation allows or does not allow. And if there is a DR to be done, the DR can be on public cloud. So these different types of hybrid models we've also seen, especially in terms of the 5g, when we talk about ultra low latency kind of use cases or industrial IOT use cases, there's always a discussion about deployment near to the customer premises. So in those cases, again, the hybrid deployment which we are supporting is very handy.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:02):
Great. Thanks very much everyone for all those comments. I want to move it along, but emea, I'd like to start with you first if I could. We obviously hear a lot about AI at the moment, but also its associated data aspects. Would a public cloud-based solution create better data integration, perhaps removing data silos and offering a more unified approach for better analytics and for ai? Amir, what do you think?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (15:30):
Yeah, I think a unified data approach is a key element of optimizing the operations and making it so-called digital support systems and not having the silos. So telcos are sitting on a gold mine of data and only by integrating this and unifying the approach, this can become a foundation on which the telcos can benefit the true power of the public cloud ecosystem. And again, I want to talk about this ecosystem because there are a lot of these application providers and we work with a lot of them now who can manage the data in a much better way and there is a continuous innovation going on. You cannot have that continuous innovation in a private cloud or in a siloed environment. We've seen a lot of modern AI and ML tools which are most optimized for public cloud, especially now the gen AI based network optimization, customer support chat Botts are just a few real life examples. And Opti has also recently announced our own gen AI based smart catalog and customer support and customer segmentation tools, which are enabling the market marketing team of the telcos to just talk to the BSS system in a normal natural language. And that system can suggest new plans based on a contextual trend analysis. And this is only possible because we are on a public cloud and we leverage the AI applications from the likes of Google are similar.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (17:04):
Great. Yeah, thanks very much Amir. Andy, what are your thoughts here? Let's come to you.

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (17:10):
Yeah, I mean it's right that there is a gold mine of data there, but I think the typical case for most of TM forum's members is that that data is not structured right and it's not accessible in real time, not ready for AI if you like. And so the migration of applications into cloud native environments is a good opportunity to rethink data architecture. The old approach of having master data management in applications and a big data lake for the data scientists to run BI and operational data stores for other purposes, I think this all needs a rethink. AI needs data represented differently semantically in knowledge graphs, we need to use event streaming architectures so that the data, large amounts of data can be accessed in real time by AI running training itself as it works. And these kinds of things require new approaches. There's a lot of experimentation going on at the moment.

(18:19):
Many operators are beginning to use Kafka for event streaming and beginning to explore knowledge graphs. A lot of our TM forum proof of concept projects are using these newer technologies, but I think it's time for the industry to really move to that model. Gen AI is revolutionizing the world because the internet has trained AI to speak, but that's because largely the semantic web has been developing standards from the worldwide web consortium, have enabled data structures on the internet that have enabled AI to speak the data. And telecoms isn't really fit at the moment to train the AI to speak telco. And that's a challenge for us all as an industry to overcome, to move to common ways of structuring data that's really optimized for ai.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:13):
Yeah, absolutely. Andy, I think a lot of different industries are struggling with this at the moment. Aren't they getting data schema to work across different data sets? Lingli, let's come across to you this whole issue of data and its application here. What are your thoughts?

Lingli Deng, China Mobile/ETSI (19:29):
I think from a technical perspective, public cloud at present time, yes, they're actually offering the cutting edge, I believe technology that needed to improve our analytics and also JN ai. But as I said earlier, adopting those technology solutions does not mean that we have to necessarily to transfer entirely to a public cloud deployment. Even if some CSPs are actually trying public cloud deployment, it does not also necessarily mean that they will be delegating the data analytics and data mining tasks entirely to the public cloud service providers for data integration especially I think it is obviously for those under strict regulation requirements like CSPs, they must taking the full responsibility for their data. And also there's other type of CSPs, I think some of them are also made announcement and they're getting alliances with each other to actually develop their own industrial adapted big models because they see that their network and service data is actually at the core for their service innovation and for generating more revenue. So for that case, they might also having other types of technology or solutioning collaboration for different type of deployment patterns. For example, introducing toolings at the local sites or collaborating together for introducing foundation model, but with a private cloud deployment pattern to use their Arial data to do the fine tuning for their applications. So I think these are all possibilities. So I believe that the answer to this question is perhaps yes from technical perspective, but not the only way. Perhaps we have better ways and it depends on the circumstances.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (22:06):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Lingli, as you say, it depends on the circumstances of the particular telco, but if I can stay with you because there's a related question I'd like to ask here and that is, where do you think the value is in aligning the OSS and BSS technology to create this unified layer, this digital support system solution, and is it even possible to do this on public cloud deployments?

Lingli Deng, China Mobile/ETSI (22:32):
Well, I think everyone would agree that if we have a unified technical stack for both OSS and business would do a lot of benefits to the CSP because more or less, these are typical IT software systems as Amir has rightfully and pointed out. And so by sharing a unified technical stack, could I think considerably reduce the unnecessary expenditure from the CSPs and in terms of hardware, software, operation and costs and also making it more easily and rapidly to do technical innovation because they don't have to taking care of different stacks and having to worry about when to upgrade which and how to get it synchronized. So it will be huge, I think benefits to have a unified technical stack. And I think if a CSP consider moving into a public cloud deployment might very much likely to accelerate this process because migrating to one single public cloud, which says that those hyperscalers actually providing a lot of common infrastructures past services and toolings and that to say that it'll left much less for the CSPs to actually consider taking care of about the rest of the OSS and basis stack, which is typically the cloud native applications only.

(24:26):
But I think that migrating to public cloud is not a necessary requirements. Other deployment pattern could also do that as long as we are moving towards cloud native paradigm and TM and also at CNN, these standards guidelines, and this could also be possible. And also moving into public cloud paradigm is I believe also not sufficient to unify these two technical stack consider the case if the CSB choose to migrate OSS or BSS into different public cloud service providers, different hyperscalers, we all know that they have different technical stack and their ecosystem is actually not compatible with each other. It is quite different from what we have usually do with the standardized sector of the city industry. So if the SB choose to work with different hyperscalers or moving different parts of their systems to different hyperscalers, it won't necessarily help with accelerating the unified stack between these different systems.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (25:52):
Great. Thank you Lingli, great questions raised there. I'm sure Amir you want to respond to some of those, but let's first of all go to Andy and Andy, let's get your take.

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (26:01):
Yeah, I was just going to say the traditional layered separation between BSS and OSS and then the network systems underneath was really fine in a world where the network systems change very slowly, but now the network is much more dynamic. It's built from software and so complex services like network slices, the expectation is that those can be provisioned, ordered and provisioned on the fly and assured automatically in this kind of environment that can only work really if there is a holistic design top to bottom. I mean not just OSS and BSS, but integration into the network systems as well. And so really this is one of the fundamental principles in the ODA, the open digital architecture is to think holistically about the design of all of the software systems that are running the business and the network. And especially as the network becomes software, really how that's deployed into as cloud native network functions into cloud environments, whether public cloud or private cloud really it's no different from other software in terms of the lifecycle management of those software components. So using a common approach to deployment, common approaches to site reliability engineering for the network software and the OSS and BSS software just makes sense. It's efficient to do it that way.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:32):
Great. Thanks so much Andy. Great insights then. Great work you're doing on the ODA Amir. Let's come across to you, I promise to come across to you on this question. What are your thoughts here? You brought up earlier the digital support systems and the unified layer and that's what we've been exploring here. What are your comments?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (27:50):
I just wanted to add a couple of topics, but firstly what Andy suggested because TM forum is playing a key role here. So most operators, sorry, most vendors are adapting to the TM forum ODA and open APIs. And I think unifying the OSS and BSS stack is a key element which most operators when they're getting the OSS and BSS from two different vendors, this is a big pain point and ODA and the TM forum open APIs. These two things are streamlining the integrations between the two different systems. But again, I just want to look at it from an end-to-end customer lifecycle point of view as well. Because think of gone are the days when a customer walked into a shop and then he ordered a service, maybe the service would be activated in a few days and then he is happy, but now customers are more agile and digital.

(28:44):
So right from the digital marketing to target and attract the correct customers through their preferred channels. And then the customers doing the self-registration via the digital channels of their choice, order management, service fulfillment, network inventory activation, device logistics. So all of these different elements of the service enablement and service fulfillment and even going into the billing and the payments and the customer care where the customers are getting the care from, not the traditional CSRs but more from a gen AI or let's say the contact center AI kind of tooling. So all of these different things work much better when the O OSS and BSS are working together and they're much optimized when it is really running on a public cloud and actually on a single public cloud because we talked the hybrid deployment as well, there is cost involved in moving data from one cloud provider to another cloud provider. So I think the best way is that we have a single vendor who is doing the OSS and BSS deployed in a single cloud platform. That's the most optimum way.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (30:03):
Great. Thanks very much Amir. Thank you everyone for those comments. Brings us to our final question. We've heard the benefits and the reasons why and how to perhaps go about this, but what are the potential drawbacks or difficulties to migrating digital support systems to the public cloud? What should togas be aware of if they've decided to go down this route? And also could a TOCO still run an efficient and modern O-S-S-B-S-S solution locally? And indeed, perhaps we could come across to you for this final question for your thoughts.

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (30:40):
Well, I think addressing the second part of the question first and the answer is absolutely yes. As NG Lee has mentioned a few times that whether it's a public cloud platform or a private cloud platform, if it's cloud native, then that's, you're going to get very similar benefits. I think the challenges and potential drawbacks of migration to public cloud are really the same as for any transformation project. The challenges are always about how to do the migration efficiently. There's increased cost initially because you are running the old systems and the new systems, you're trying to create new business value through the migration transformation, you're trying to also reduce cost typically and improve customer experience. So these are the three drivers normally for any transformation project. And the temptation I think is often to focus on the cost because you want to switch off the old systems as quickly as possible.

(31:41):
And so the temptation is just to try and reproduce everything you have in the old system in the new one and then you end up as that being the main driver. I think that the trick with any transformation project is to keep your eye on the new business value and those are the things that are going to drive growth in our industry. The real challenge for our industry at the moment, of course, that the existential crisis almost is how to reignite growth. And so I think in particular, AI offers an opportunity to at least ignite profitability, but potentially also reignite growth with new types of services that are just not possible with manual processes and systems. So I think this is where the cloud migration, the cloud native migration in particular needs to focus. It's how we ensure that we stay focused on the new business value and not just on the cost.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (32:33):
Great. Great advice. Thanks so much for that. Amir. Let's come across to you for final thoughts on this topic.

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (32:41):
Yeah, so I think what I have seen personally is there is two things. So one of course Liny also mentioned regulatory and data localization kind of requirements in certain countries. And secondly there is the challenge is resistance to change. Public cloud is a different paradigm and people need to change the way they have been working for many, many years. So I think in order to get it right, the business objectives of this cloud transformation has to come from the top. I have seen in many operators where they try to do it without having a final or an executive sponsorship. That is not the best way. I think the senior management needs to decide that we are doing this and we'll do whatever it takes to do this because there are key benefits and it needs to be a measured approach. We should not just do a public cloud migration because for the sake of it we should know and we should know the benefits and we should measure the success and even make it incremental success.

(33:50):
So bring some benefits today and then in three to five years we'll be in a much better position where we leverage the rest of the benefits as well. And just one more topic, I think the key element of public cloud projects is also the kind of scalability and in let's say the growth. Because in private cloud, you need to replace your hardware every few years and you need to scale the environments because if there is a cyclic or if there's a seasonal traffic pattern in some operators they need to prepare for the full, let's say, full capacity for the peak season where the public cloud is more scalable. So these are some of the key benefits which are only possible when they migrate. But as I said, I've seen a lot of times those operators who don't migrate, they rely on middle management or the lower staff where there is a lot of resistance to change.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (34:49):
Great. Thanks Amir. Transformation project. It's a journey. Keep your eye on the benefits. Lingli, let's come across to you finally to wrap up our discussion and some final thoughts from you because as you've already said, it depends very much on the particular telco and their set of circumstances. And what I'm getting for you also is so long as it's cloud native, that's the most important aspect here.

Lingli Deng, China Mobile/ETSI (35:14):
Yes, thank you. I think I've already said something about this topic. So to summarize, data regulation, service assurance, and especially cost and efficiency, those are the factors I think really needs to be verified. Before that, we could see that public cloud deployment could prevail and just getting more information and for you guys to take away is that, for example, in China, in addition to traditional telecom network services, all the three major telecom carriers are actually leading the market for public cloud in mainland China. But so far as we know that none of them actually considering migrating their own OSS or BSS into the public cloud or even to their own public cloud. I think these are some cases that could also bring to further reflections or other service providers to consider, at least within these cases, our local deployment must have been doing something good or beneficial.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (36:44):
Yep, there's going to be a reason for it. Absolutely. Lingli, thanks for that and to remind you, us about what's happening in China, we're going to leave it there for now and I'm sure we'll continue this debate during our live q and a show later today. For now, thank you all for taking part in our discussion. If you are watching this on day two of our digital support systems summer, then please do send us your questions and we'll try and answer as many of them as we can in our live q and a show, which is coming up a little later. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website and that's where you'll also find the q and a form and our poll question For now though, thanks for watching and goodbye.