Kailem Anderson sees the move to cloud-native operational support systems (OSS) as an essential one for communication service providers (CSPs) that need to keep pace with today’s fast-changing technology and market landscape.
According to Anderson, CSP have already moved to cloud native BSS, and modernizing the OSS is now the most important part of their digital transformation initiatives. “A cloud native OSS is important because it enables the CSP to play a more active role in the cloud ecosystem…it also reduces costs.”
As Vice President of Portfolio and Engineering for Ciena's Blue Planet division, Anderson is uniquely positioned to discuss the need for this shift. “It's really exciting to be working in a company that…gives us the space to innovate and pioneer.”
In this exclusive interview, he shares his unique insights on cloud-native OSS, exploring topics like the interdependence of 5G and cloud; the role of automation in service monetization; and the importance of taking an incremental approach to transformation
According to Anderson, transformation begins with a unified, dynamic inventory. “You can't automate what you can't see, and clean inventory is the beating heart of any next-generation service,” Anderson explains.
The VP also explains how microservices improve OSS flexibility, scalability and portability, and how open-source accelerates innovation. Anderson says “…you're riding the innovation curve of a much, much larger ecosystem of people that are supporting these capabilities, and that also future -proofs your investments.”
“It's an exciting time…we're big believers in the telecommunication industry, but also, that it needs to evolve,” Anderson adds. “Our goal, it's really to deliver an open and programmable OSS for this ecosystem that's cloud native and
microservices based.”
Tune into the full interview for his full range of key insights.
Stephen Saunders:
Hey, Kailem, why is cloud OSS so important to service providers?
Kailem Anderson:
Yeah, it's a good starter question. OSS is critical because these are the systems our CSP's customers use to manage the lifecycle of their services, and more importantly, monetize their networks. Now, the reality is these OSS systems, they've been in place 20 years, right? Built for another time, another place when the world was static. Times have changed. We live in an instant gratification world of real-time services, and the reality is these inventory, NMS, and services assurance systems just don't work well in a real-time, dynamically-changing world of 5G, edge and IoT.
So, for me, modernizing to a cloud-native OSS is important because it enables the CSP to play a more active role in the cloud ecosystem by creating, delivering innovative digital services. And also, because it reduces cost by automating operations and simplifying integration. So, the reality is CSPs, they've moved to cloud-native BSS, they've moved to cloud-native networks. So, really modernizing the OSS is now the most important part of their digital-transformation journey, and that's where really Blue Planet plays. Our goal, it's really to deliver an open and programmable OSS for this ecosystem that's cloud-native and microservices-based.
Stephen Saunders:
So, Kailem, it's really interesting, isn't it, that two of the biggest factors driving the need for cloud OSS are 5G, but also, cloud itself. How does that work?
Kailem Anderson:
Yeah, so 5G and cloudified services are a huge driver for our customers adopting cloud OSS. For me, it's really simple. 5G, cloud and automation all go hand-in-hand. Can't do 5G without automation and 5G with cloud are inherently linked. So, the environments, the ecosystems go hand-in-hand and they're just too complex to do manually. So, if you look at things like the operational complexity involved in managing a cloud-based service delivered across an open and disaggregated network, it sort of makes cloud-native OSS an automation imperative.
And legacy systems just can't provide the elasticity, scale, flexibility and programmability that's needed to deliver the service as demanded. And this is especially true when you start looking at supporting on-demand services, things like end-to-end network slicing or network-as-a-service use cases. And these next-generation services, they're built on a few key principles. They do embrace cloud-native inherently themselves, they're elastic, they're portable, they're disaggregated, right? You look at 5G, it's broken hardware and software stacks are part of a traditional equipment models, they're software-centric and they embrace standards. All of that is sort of in the key DNA of cloud-native that makes it inherent that needs to be adopted.
Stephen Saunders:
Yeah, I mean it's terribly inconvenient, isn't it? Because people used to stay in one place on telecommunications networks and if they moved, they would have to let you know if you're a service provider and give you six weeks' notice. But that's not the nature of the world anymore. Everything's fungible, everything's fluid. I think it must be an anxious time for these tier-one carriers who are trying to address these problems. I mean, what do they have to do? They have to rip out the old OSS and put in a new one? That sounds terrible.
Kailem Anderson:
Yeah, it is sort of getting to the core of the problem statement. So, the reality is CSPIT teams have already moved other systems and applications to the cloud, as I mentioned before. So, now they're really ready to transition the OSS. And more than 85% of our customers inside of Blue Planet are putting their workloads on the public cloud. So, we shouldn't be having a discussion about is this shift coming? The shift is happening right now. And the reality is telcos, they've adopted cloud due to its benefits, simplicity, ability to turn up, tear down and scale out on demand. So, the natural evolution of this is OSS being cloud-native, so you can reap the benefits of the cloud, just beyond traditional lifting and shifting and containerization.
So, we advocate an incremental approach to this digital transformation. We know big bang is risky given these legacy systems touch a lot of things, and they're sort of spaghettified out into the BSS, OSS and network. So, for me, many customers, they start their cloud native journey with a unified dynamic inventory, which I think is the foundation for OSS. And first step in any OSS transformation is data. You can't automate what you can't see, and clean inventory is the beating heart of any next-generation service. So, being able to federate cleanse, normalize the data from a legacy system into a modern data store record is key.
Once you know your environment, then you can do funky advanced automation. You can then automate in your order to service or bring in orchestrators, you can start leveraging AI to do trouble to resolve and deliver services assurance. But really, the starting point is that inventory to then get you to these advanced functions. One final point I would raise, worst thing you can do if you're modernizing your OSS to a cloud-native is just lift and shift the legacy. You get no benefits doing that. Pick a modernized solution that's future-proof and will future-proof your OSS the next 20 years is really what I advocate.
Stephen Saunders:
And there's a lot of incompatibility in the data and service provider networks now. So, that inventory, that audit, and that consolidation is incredibly important, isn't it? Can you automate that process to go out and find the data and pull it in and consolidate it and make it into a uniform data set?
Kailem Anderson:
Just providing a platform itself that can be a data store record, it's really only solving a part of the problem. Figuring out how you actually get the information out of the legacy system, how you cleanse it, how you normalize it, and then can actually leverage it and then push it to the other systems is really the key challenge. So, providing those capabilities, providing the tools, providing the ingestion frameworks to take the customers on that journey is really about delivering the true value. If you leave it to them, they're not going to be able to do it, because a lot of these data formats, they're incompatible. They were built 20 years ago. So, taking them on that data transformation journey in addition to providing a next-generation platform is really about providing the real value.
Stephen Saunders:
And terrifyingly, a lot of the data is actually still stored in Excel spreadsheets, apparently. Great that they've got you to help them with it. You mentioned microservices. What are microservices and why should we care about them?
Kailem Anderson:
Yeah, so firstly, cloud-native applications are built with microservices and leveraging containers. Why does it matter? Because it makes the software more resilient, more resource efficient, as well as easier to deploy, maintain and enhance, which is critical for an OSS. So, essentially it makes it easier to lifecycle manage. They also allow us to make our OSS platforms and applications more modular, and this is a really important point that gets missed. It means customers can purchase and deploy capabilities and features that they want, versus having to consume a big monolithic platform. And this is really the polar opposite of legacy OSS environments that typically use dozens of customized software apps deployed and integrated in silos, making it notoriously expensive to maintain.
The final piece I would flag is legacy systems also act as a bit of a black box. So, when something goes wrong can be really difficult to troubleshoot. With a microservices-based approach that leverages open source, not only can you lifecycle manage the environment much better, but you're also leveraging the open source community that has built a lot of these capabilities. So, you're riding the innovation curve of a much, much larger ecosystem of people that are supporting and that also future-proofs your investments.
Stephen Saunders:
How's life at Blue Planet? Because you guys are like the SWAT team at Ciena, aren't you? You kind of broke away and you're doing all of this whizzy stuff. I guess the rest of the Cienans are very jealous. Do you still talk to them?
Kailem Anderson:
Yeah, yeah. So, obviously, Blue Planet's a division of Ciena. We're the software guys, obviously in an optical hardware company. I like to say, "Hey, we get to do all the cool stuff." We're building software. We push the innovation curve. We want to be the change agents in this OSS or intelligent automation space, and really, drag the industry out of the Stone Age into these modernized cloud-native OSS environments. It's an exciting time. It's really exciting to be working in a company that believes this and gives us the space to innovate and pioneer and do something very different because we're all big believers in the telecommunication industry, but also, that it needs to evolve.
Stephen Saunders:
Yeah, you're in the middle of it. Yeah, congratulations, Kailem. Great to talk to you.
Kailem Anderson:
Likewise. Thank you.