We are at a very interesting point where we are seeing a major transformation of the networking infrastructure happening, where the network infrastructures are moving from physical to virtual. A lot of our traditional networking solutions, the Telcos and the enterprises have built using physical nodes, and they're now migrating to virtual network functions, and what that means is if you look from a BSS, OSS standpoint the existing solutions also need to evolve so that they can start to work with hybrid networks which will have physical network functions as well as virtual network functions.
VNA takes information from each of the different VNS vendors and feeds them up into the service assurance solution.
Valuable Features:
Improvements to My Organization:
If you look at the traditional BSS, OSS solutions, they were working with the physical network functions. Now, as the infrastructure starts to get virutalized and you bring in virtual network functions, the OSS solutions, like from service assurance standpoint, if you think about it, they now need to go and work with the physical but they also need to get all the information, north to south, from the virtual network function. That's where the VNA comes in. You will have multi-vendor VNS, so you have VNS coming from different vendors, each providing their own modules and capabilities, but VNA takes all that information from each of the different VNS and then it harmonizes them and feeds them up into the service assurance solution. That's where you need VNA, to really make the services assurance stack now evolve and work with the virtualized infrastructure.
Room for Improvement:
We've been using, for example, the CA service assurance solution for physical network infrastructures, and we've been using that. Now as the network infrastructure evolves more towards a virtualized network function that really brings in the need for the VNA, so that now you can take the service assurance stack and make it work both with the physical as well as the virtual networking infrastructure. I think of the other broader things as the industry is migrating from physical infrastructures to virtual infrastructure, I think there's a bigger question that the industry is looking, is how to we close-loop the fulfillment and assurance. I think as we look at closing the loop between the fulfillment, so that we can really start bringing in close-loop control and really start achieving higher levels of automation all in the network. I think that's the next big step, and obviously in that regard I'm sure the solution will evolve further and bring in those capabilities that can make those close-loop controls realized in the real world.
Other Advice:
We're working with CA and Juniper, bringing a complete integrated solution for a virtualized CPE, which will have virtualized CPE functions which can be centralized distributed but then really taking them northbound, integrated with the CA spectrum as well CA's performance management solutions. We'll be bringing in the CA VNA, because a lot of these CPEs are virtual network functions, so again, from a VNA perspective bringing those capabilities out from the underlying VNS, in this particular case the CPEs, and really propagating them up into the OSS solution from CA.
CA is a great partner for us, and while we are a vendor agnostic systems integrator and we work with a number of solutions, CA is a great partner for us because they bring in the service assurance suite, and in this particular case that I talked about where we are working with CA and Juniper creating a complete solution stack. Now what we needed in this particular solution was a virtualized CPE. We bought that from Juniper, but we needed an OSS stack from the service assurance perspective that would support virtual network functions with CA's VNA. It had that capability, and that's why I'm here and working with them.
The service providers, even larger enterprises, when these service providers are looking at the service assurance solutions one of the things that must be kept in mind now going forward, especially when we talk about OSS transformations, the networking infrastructure is evolving and will migrate from physical network functions to virtual network functions, and we will have networks that will have hybrid network functions in them, physical and virtual. And so the OSS and BSS infrastructure and solutions must support both, physical and the virtual. Anybody who's making these decisions going forward, when they're thinking about how the OSS service assurance stack needs to migrate and transform I would say it becomes absolutely critical for them to think that it must support the virtual network functions, and hence have physical and virtual networking capabilities. I think this is where CA VNA becomes so critical to really bring that virtual network function capabilities and support that so you can realize hybrid network functions.
