Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, has added new software enhancements to its intelligent automation product portfolio, helping communication service providers (CSPs) accelerate their digital transformation and quickly monetize innovative digital services built on 5G and multi-cloud infrastructure. These enhancements deliver end-to-end observability and control to automate service lifecycle management, improve operational agility and optimize customer experience.
The latest software innovations across the Blue Planet intelligent automation portfolio address multiple CSP digital transformation challenges and opportunities:
5G automation: The emergence of 5G standalone, network slicing and multi-access edge computing (MEC) allows CSPs to monetize their network in new ways by delivering innovative slice-based services and offering true digital experiences. Blue Planet is providing new 5G automation capabilities that include:
· An open, productized 5G network slicing solution that incorporates end-to-end orchestration and observability for zero-touch lifecycle management – automating design, activation, assurance, and modification – of slices, including sub-slice management, across the radio access network (RAN) to the core.
· Dynamic inventory for visualizing the optimal placement of physical and cloud-native resources as well as the end-to-end 5G service topology to help CSPs plan and deploy their 5G resources quickly and efficiently.
Multi-Cloud extensibility: Open cloud-based approaches are critical to increasing scale and agility, as well as enabling elastic connectivity models with cloud providers. New Blue Planet multi-cloud enhancements include:
· Broad Kubernetes support that enables the intelligent placement and orchestration of cloud-based network functions (CNFs) and applications in distributed multi-cloud environments. As a truly cloud-native platform, Blue Planet can be deployed in any public or private cloud and can be consumed in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
· As a key player in the multi-cloud ecosystem, Blue Planet has recently joined Nephio, a new Linux Foundation open-source project seeded by Google and focused on Kubernetes-based intent-driven automation of network functions and the underlying infrastructure that supports them.
Low-code usability: Low-code technology helps CSPs improve operational agility by empowering them and their system integration partners to design and build new service types and applications for end customers with minimal IT and vendor support. New Blue Planet low-code enhancements include:
· A single set of integrated development tools across the Blue Planet portfolio to accelerate the onboarding of new network resources and declarative templating abilities that simplify the modeling and creation of new services.
"With the rise of 5G and cloudified services, CSPs’ network and service operations will become even more complicated, making automation a necessity. Blue Planet has been making steady incremental progress to enable CSP automation, with its vendor-agnostic, modular, programmable take on service lifecycle management. This latest product upgrade from Blue Planet, with its focus on simplicity for the customer, provides telcos with an opportunity for growth and to engage with the digital economy,” said Francis Haysom, Principal Analyst, Appledore.
"Digitization is accelerating for CSPs as they modernize their operations to deliver innovative new services more quickly and cost-effectively,” said Rick Hamilton, Senior Vice President, Blue Planet. “At Blue Planet, we are laser-focused on creating intelligent automation capabilities that help our CSP customers digitize operations and deliver exciting new digital services to improve the customer experience.”
