The ubiquity of broadband, combined with an ever-growing variety of powerful applications, are delivering more online shopping, entertainment, finance, education, dining, and information retrieval experiences than ever before. For example, in November of 2014, the sales volume of online shopping website Taobao reached CNY57.1 billion and the order volume per minute broke one record after another. In the financial sector, China Merchants Bank achieved impressive results with its eBank, having a small number of offline outlets. Both cases demonstrate how applying the Internet to traditional industries can result in unimaginable success. The new behavior patt ern of today’s Internet users, as well as the future direction of ICT development, can be summarized as real time, on-demand, all-online, DIY, and social or “ROADS” for short.
As the primary and ultimate carrier of digital services, telecoms operators are determined to capitalize on the opportunities created by the customers’ requirements for ROADS services. They are committed to strategic transformation by becoming new integrated service providers, however, the biggest challenge to their transformation will be their current operating systems.
The issue with traditional operating systems is that they are just simple support systems that perform basic services, such as configuration management and billing, and they are not equipped to support complex service policies. In order to produce the ROADS experience consumers desire, the next-generation operations system must be an open, flexible, intelligent, and agile platform. A critical element is that the platform must implement real-time service management and orchestration to directly create value.
For users, this next-generation operations system will function like an online shopping website from which they can choose or customize services and products. For telco partners, the system is a channel where content providers, software developers, and game providers can all sell and distribute products. For telco developers, the system will act as an online development platform, in which they can flexibly schedule resources from the entire network and create a rich variety of services using simple programming languages.
From the perspective of functional modules, the next-generation operations system must contain three core modules:
1. Infrastructure operations support module: Used for flexible scheduling of bottom-layer ICT infrastructure. SDN and NFV are the key to this functional module, which features automation, such as automatic resource management and allocation.
2. Intelligent big data engine: Telcos need to mine the huge amounts of user data for useful information, then recreate users’ service scenarios and generate valuable service policies.
3. Business enabling module: This is a user-oriented service development interface that ensures a short time-to-market for telcos and partner service development, and fast service purchasing by end users.
Huawei has named its next-generation operations system the Telco OS because it covers the entire lifecycle of telco resource, service, and operations management. With Telco OS, carriers can deliver ROADS services to end users and meet the ICT requirements of businesses. Transformation towards Telco OS will take time and Huawei is eager to work with leading global carriers on the interconnection and interworking of multi-vendor devices, the coexistence and management of new and old systems, and other technical details of the architecture.
(Huawei will showcase its comprehensive technology capabilities and innovations at Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Spain. For more information, please visit: http://www.huawei.com/minisite/mwc2015/preview/en/index.html)
| ABOUT THIS ARTICLE Knowledge Network Articles enable our partners to create high value content to express a particular view or highlight an opinion in an editor ial style environment on Total Telecom, they are not produced by our editors and do not reflect the views of Total Telecom. To find out about content creation opportunities for your organisation visit the information page or email info@totaltele.com |
