Achieving ICT managed services success – Interview with Leroy G. Blimegger Jr.

 

Blimegger has been with Huawei since the early days of its development into Managed Services – from when he freely admits they were just chosen to “lower the numbers” in terms of tender invites – to today, where they are seen as one of the leading players focused on helping customers achieve their required business outcomes.

 

“The current state of automation is quite basic and can be likened to a row of dominos. Flip one, and they knock into each other but where the gap is too wide the sequence breaks. This is like automation without intelligence but with intelligent automation, the system itself will adapt to ‘fill the gap’ around the missing domino and allow the automation process to continue.

 

“We are today at the advent of the 4th industrial revolution, moving from mechanisation, through electrification to computers and very basic automation to what is called cyber physical systems. This is where intelligence is built into everything.  So in my example there is intelligence built into every single domino.

 

“We are not there yet. The reality is that in order to operate in what is often termed as a “hyper connected world” we need to look beyond purely the networks we know today and look at the verticals too – such as medical, e-learning, connected cars and transportation for example. This all needs to be integrated and we can only achieve true value with Managed Services for our customers in such an environment with full intelligent automation”.

 

As well as the integration of vertical markets producing extra demand on service providers, they are being bombarded with adoption of SDN and NFV technologies, while coming up fast on the horizon is the world of IoT and of course the development of 5G. Blimegger recalls an episode from some years ago, when the introduction of SMS voting on a coast-to-coast talent show in the US brought an entire city network crashing down with no means of quick recovery because other parts of the network, which were not overloaded, could not actually be accessed in order to utilize spare capacity.

 

“That kind of service provider experience tends to focus minds and for this example in particular, SDN and NFV became priorities. In today’s world, where we have IoT coming and 5G to cope with as well, we cannot just provide box after box, we have to have virtual machines anywhere in the network to provide specific functions when needed.

 

“The effect of all this on the managed services world is that it is not just about OPEX savings – now we have virtual functions and elements all around the country and we are no longer sitting at a physical location and a physical switching centre saying we are managing the client equipment. We have to change the way we look at the network and monitor it more dynamically, with more agility, so that, as the network changes, different virtual machines spin up to deliver network functions and we can see that happening and make sure there are no failures”.

 

“So this impacts the costing for managed services. Instead of looking merely at OPEX reduction we have to look at providing our services based on business outcomes”.

 

An early focus for Huawei in this area, according to Blimegger, has always been around the end user experience. The theory goes that if the end user is happy, the service provider will be happy too and those dreaded statistics around churn and ARPU (average revenue per user) will both start heading in the right direction.

 

And end user experience comes in all shapes and sizes.

 

“Even if you’re talking about Internet of Things or machine to machine there is a sensor out there that has to function properly or its end user – the person or organisation depending on it – will have a negative end user experience when the data they need, like a smart meter, doesn’t get through.

 

Next year Huawei celebrates a decade of its Managed Services business – although it did start to “dabble” in managed services two years previously with a breakthrough in Bangladesh. Blimegger has been through most of that ten years but what does he see as the next challenges for the business as the industry gets to grips with the future?

 

“We are going to be moving from about five billion connected devices to over 50 billion – it’s on that scale. But the main challenges for us are to move from just seeking efficiencies to save OPEX and improve end user experience to proactively supporting a period of transformation,” he said.

 

“Operators have to go from legacy network architecture to an SDN environment to support virtual functions. They’re move from 3G to 4G to 5G. They need to introduce things like network slicing and in all things they have a choice – manage the transformations by themselves or they can bring a partner in to manage these transformations”.

 

For Blimegger the partner choice is not just around industry experience, knowledge and the service provider making people available. The Managed Service Provider has to have the capability of going beyond just technology management – such as helping to develop the transformation plan and understanding the organisational and skill requirements of each operator they work with.

 

This is particularly vital in the SDN and NFV world where the task is managing the CT (Communications Technology) domain but also increasingly the IT (Information Technology) domain together – especially as the IT part is getter bigger all the time as data becomes a key part of communications delivery.

 

“If you think of the situation in terms of two bubbles, there was a time when the CT bubble was all we worked with, while all those IT bubble folks did their own thing. But as we move into the world of 3G, 4G and IoT, the IT Bubble is getting bigger much faster than the CT bubble – in fact we are virtually in a world where the CT part will sit inside the IT bubble,” he said.

 

Getting the industry to adjust to IT “bubble” supremacy and for those working from the communications environment to understand the change is one of the challenges Blimegger sees over the next five years. He also sees that equally the IT world will need to understand what is truly meant by the term “carrier grade”, because a world reliant on billions of connections will not stand for the old fashioned IT downtime.

 

Blimegger sees Managed Services as being critical to the industry’s ability to actually deliver all the new exciting technologies being developed. In ten years he has seen Huawei – by his own admission – “make mistakes” – but has also learned, shaped and moulded world class offerings across both CT and IT domains. There is no doubt that the evolution of Managed Services will continue at pace. Blimegger seems ready and is passionate and enthusiastic about the challenges ahead.

 

“Huawei’s Operation Web Services (OWS) is an open, programmable, cloud based platform utilizing a micro-service based architecture. OWS allows us to transform operations from reactive to real-time, on-demand operations in a virtualized environment across both CT and IT domains. The platform is geared towards enabling DevOps, with end-to-end monitoring, connectivity to our data analytics engine, and most importantly, gives us the ability to achieve end-to-end intelligent automation,” said Blimegger

 

Aided by automation and embracing network transformation, Huawei – and its competitors – could find their “forgotten hero” roles finally getting the credit their commitment and experience deserves.

 

 

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