BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – February 23, 2017 – As service providers around the globe explore paths to cloud, IoT and 5G, Cisco is focused on building solutions that offer programmability, automation and virtualization to simplify operations and lower their total cost of ownership (TCO).

With more than 73 million mobile customers in Japan, NTT DOCOMO, INC., is managing intense demands on its core network to provide communication services to its subscribers.

DOCOMO deployed a network functions virtualization (NFV) system last year, but due to the complexity and time-consuming operations with network device provisioning, it has taken the initiative to fully improve its business efficiency by applying “automation” to various operations.

“Cisco showed a deep understanding of our vision and priority to maintain a complex network with agility and flexibility, to increase our market competitiveness as we enter the virtualization, IoT, and 5G mobile communication era,” said Mr. Shinobu Kaneshige, general manager of Core Network Engineering Department, NTT DOCOMO, INC. “We value Cisco’s expertise and support as a strategic business partner to continue innovating our network to meet the high network quality demand in Japan market.”

The Cisco^® Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) software platform will help DOCOMO realize a series of new benefits, including:

• Cut service activation times from days to hours
• Create, modify, and remove services in real time
• Automate its service lifecycle and reduce manual configuration steps by up to 90 percent
• Easily bundle multiple network services fast, and help ensure them in real time
• Manage network changes, modify services, and reconfigure devices while in live production

“By converting existing manual construction workflow into automated operation with the Cisco NSO implementation, we aim to lower our overall network device provisioning operations and time drastically, and achieve smooth transition to commercialized network operation by reducing configuration error,” said D r. Atsushi Murase, director , e xecutive g eneral m anager of Solution Service Division , DOCOMO Technology, Inc. “This will enable us to simplify network operations while gaining improved efficiency to respond to operational requirements to provide high quality and reliable services to our customers.”

“With Cisco NSO, DOCOMO can reduce operational costs, work time, and manual configuration error with the click of a mouse,” said Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president, general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco. “With this innovative NFV system, they are creating a world-class example of how service providers can easily apply automation to the operations for network device provisioning to deliver services faster and improve service quality.”

Cisco is building the simplified, automated and virtualized network platform of the future based on industry-leading software, systems, silicon and services. This enables service providers, media and web companies worldwide to reduce costs, speed time-to-market, secure their networks and sustain profitable growth.