Significant investments require significant returns. How do companies ensure their benefits are measured, tracked and realized during IP Transformation Programs?
Success is Not Guaranteed
Think about the hardest project you have ever delivered. Just think back… that one ‘special project’, the one that spiraled out of control, the one where the requirements kept changing, the one where the objectives kept moving, the one project that would not de-scope, where the tsunami of work was towering over the team, and impossible deadlines were looming. Yes, that one.
Most of us have experienced THAT project. And we probably sat with our colleagues, asking ourselves how a project under such pressure could even exist. Why would the sponsors not revise the scope, refocus the team, or even reinvest the budget elsewhere?
We all know that technical projects can go awry. IT, Networking and Engineering projects – famously 50% overrun on budget, and many are cancelled altogether.
So, what are the figures for complex Transformation Programs? For Programs where IT, Network, Operations and Engineering are undergoing change simultaneously. With an objective eye, it’s easy to question how any of them actually deliver results. But indeed they do.
But, how, and what can we measure to be certain we are achieving the desired results?
The Value of Tracking the Benefits
This is where Benefits Management steps in. The major goals of the approach are to ensure that:
Benefits Management provides a set of disciplines that operate out of the Program Management Office (PMO), and ensure the benefits of complex programs are constantly measured, tracked, assessed and reshaped. Programs that truly measure benefit as a real ‘outcome’ (rather than waiting for the end of the program) are more agile in adapting to changing conditions and can reshape to meet new requirements. Benefits management is in-fact the fourth dimension to the classic time/cost/quality triangle of managing good projects.
How Does It Work?
The role of Benefits Management is to answer the four key questions in planning and delivery:
These questions are addressed through three phases of planning and measurement;
The Strategy Phase is focused on reviewing the company’s IP Transformation strategy, in order to select at a number of sub-programs that can deliver benefit or align existing change programs with that strategy. A high-level benefits map should be produced at this stage.
The Program Phase is concerned with the definition and selection of projects and initiatives to create a portfolio that will deliver the required benefits. This is the phase where most use is made of the Benefits management tools such as the Benefits Plan, Benefits Register and Risk Analysis.
The Project Phase is about the delivery of projects and initiatives to support the program, the monitoring of actual benefits against targets and benefits harvesting.
What is the Cost?
Managing benefits is a key component of complex change programs. Without it, the technical, operational, IT, business and engineering change aspects of the program can happily deliver in parallel, and then fail to coordinate the realized benefits during the program. A small investment in dedicated PMO resources to measure, track and adjust the program is a small price to pay for assurance of successful delivery. Typically, this team is no more than two or three dedicated resources and the assurance they provide outweighs the cost.
Measure, Track and Realize
We started by discussing our most challenging project experiences. In many cases, Benefits Management can reshape projects far earlier, and save those projects from failure.
The approach of measuring benefit, tracking the measurable benefits and realizing the benefits provides the tools and information for program managers to govern the program, and reshape it, or address constraints if benefits are not likely to be realized.
Benefits Management ensures that in two years’ time, we are discussing the realized benefits over a coffee, and not talking about another one of ‘those projects’. For the small cost of a few specialist resources, that’s a worthwhile investment.
These ideas are explored further in the white paper “Better business case management for IP Transformation.”
For more information on how to address the challenge of building and managing the business case for IP Transformation, please see our earlier blogs on TMCnet:
Delivering successful change programs is a significant challenge. Undertaking a Readiness Assessment speeds the launch of new IP services, reduces risks and aligns corporate objectives with your program.
The Challenge of Change…a true story
So your company is planning an all IP network. The CTO is delivering technology roadmaps, the COO is assessing the service portals, and network designers have been architecting for eight months. The program is well underway and people are now starting to plan the migration.
So, you start to scope out the effort required to deliver migration and calculate that it requires hundreds of resources to manage a switchover. You approach engineering to secure the resources, and are informed HR is managing a release program, remunerating engineers to leave the company. The same engineers that you need to deliver your program!
Sound familiar?
This is a real story, it happened to me as a Program Director. I often wonder how executives can launch complex investment programs that impact every aspect of the business, IT, Operations and Network, and then fail to align the vision with the wider company operations. And then I remember;
Addressing the Barriers to Assessment
Assessing the capability of the corporation to manage large scale change is not often addressed. It’s perceived as an academic exercise, one that poses uncomfortable questions of the companies own abilities and management, and one that can become time consuming when resources are most in demand.
However, if undertaken properly, with a specific objective and a hard timeline, such an exercise can save enormous costs in launching in managing Transformation Programs.
The Purpose of a Business Readiness Assessment
A Business Readiness Assessment provides a structured approach to determine the current state of the business to enter a large change program, and identifies the key activities that are;
Scoping Readiness Assessments
Readiness Assessments should be scoped against the range of the business that will be engaged in, and impacted by the Transformation program. That includes all organizations that manage or deliver the program, all organizations that are providing resources (or arranging resources through supplier management) and all organizations that are running parallel programs that are dependent.
The scope should assess two attributes of the organization;
Managing Readiness Assessment…Comprehensively
Readiness Assessments are undertaken through two data gathering and analysis methods:
First, the inventory of existing and planned corporate initiatives are identified and assessed. This is achieved through interviews across the stakeholder organizations, unless a central portfolio management team exists within the company. For each program, the objectives, timeline and program impacts are assessed.
Second, the ability of each organization to deliver against their program requirements is determined. Capability is measured in terms of available resources, skills, experience, reusable processes and specific tooling. This is captured through a structured interview approach, using a method of weighted scoring. This allows metric analysis of strengths and weaknesses against each area of the program, by delivery organization and capability area of discipline.
The diagram below defines the usual capability areas that need to be assessed:Generating Value
Post analysis, the Readiness Assessment is used to define a readiness action plan that prepares the organization for the Transformation Program. This includes;
A Lesson Learned
Whilst a Readiness Assessment is not necessary prior to launching large change programs, it is certainly useful. In my experience, the small investment required to run this short exercise has paid dividends across multi-year programs. It aligns program sponsors and cross division stakeholders to the IP Transformation program, which itself accelerates the launch process. In short, this approach is certainly, worth considering prior to investing in a large program, to avoid costly oversights later.
More information…
A Readiness Assessment is normally performed as part of Program Setup. These ideas are explored further in our white paper “Better business case management for IP Transformation.”
Watch for our next blog, The business case for IP Transformation: Realizing the benefits
For more information on creating an effective business case for IP Transformation, please see our earlier blogs on TMCnet, “The Business Case for IP Transformation: Creating the Case and The Business Case for IP Transformation: Managing the Service Roadmap.
]]>We need to ask… “Why Are We Building The Network?”
With IP Transformation programs sponsored and funded by the CTO, delivered by technology-focused teams, and culturally embedded within network operations, it is easy to forget that the over-riding objective of many programs is to actually change the service portfolio mix, for the benefit of both customers, and the provider.
So, how can Service Portfolio managers ensure that this vision is not lost when the programs are so heavily influenced by technology?
Step-forward…Marketing Are Sponsors Too!
The first step is to ensure that marketing (and service portfolio owners) are identified as key sponsors at the outset of the program. This is often missed when the needs of marketing are identified late in the process (during delivery), often halting the program, until the priority between technology requirements (decommissioning and cost saving) are balanced with those of services (new product launch and portfolio consolidation). The late impact of failing to recognize the central role of the services portfolio can be costly and embarrassing.
Avoid the Road To Nowhere.
Without a clear service roadmap, the program is on a road to nowhere. A service roadmap lays out the direction for service change, and ultimately derives the technical and migration priorities. In setting out a service roadmap, several considerations have to be undertaken by the portfolio team:
When analyzing each existing service, the roadmap accounts for 4 outcomes post analysis:
Each of these requires specific consideration in planning the program, prior to technology planning.
Legacy Mapping
Legacy mapping is the staple of IP Transformation programs. It is the migration of existing services to IP equivalent circuits. Whilst the protocol (transport, edge devices , and in some cases, CPE) may change, the actual service offering is within contractual boundaries of equivalence. The service team will still need to determine the customer impact (during and post migration) and if the service is still delivered, managed and priced correctly in an IP world.
Retirements
Service retirement is often discussed by network operators, but rarely executed, due to the brand issues in disrupting paying customers, and subsequent loss of revenue stream. However, the business case for IP Transformation often predicates the removal of legacy equipment, and older services with diminished user base are often loss leaders halting legacy removal. IP Transformation gives a one in a decade opportunity to finally retire those services. It takes significant account planning, and a combined executive will, but it can be done.
Service Substitution
Service Substitution replaces those services where emulation (equivalency) is not possible. In essence, the service managers identify services that can substitute similar business features of legacy ones, and position those with customers. Financial modeling and customer demographic analysis is necessary to determine the compelling adoption point (to achieve take up rates), supported by an orchestrated account management policy to engage customers and meet the program timelines.
New Service Launches
New services (or expansions to existing services) are enabled through the introduction of IP Networks. The roadmap should be used to identify which customers will be targeted, where and when, to enable new product launches during the IP Transformation timeline.
Bring It All Together.
Only when the service roadmap has been defined can the technology and migration programs be shaped and prioritized. The service roadmap defines the order in which technology is deployed, the geographies, user groups and engagement strategy. Without a service roadmap, the business case itself is called into question - which is why the roadmap is authored prior to the financial budgets.
The Service Roadmap – The Heart Of IP Transformation
We started this blog by stating that IP Transformation programs are technology-centric. In nature, they are, but at their heart lies the driver for a new service roadmap. Whilst technology is an enabler, the program outcomes are all about marketing, customer demand and return on the investment.
To learn more, please download the white paper “Better business case management for IP Transformation.” And, for more information on creating an effective business case for IP Transformation, please see our earlier blog on TMCnet, “The Business Case for IP Transformation: Creating the Case.”
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In a technology-focused environment it is possible to conclude that building the business case for IP transformation is all about the network, the technology and the associated spend. That would be a mistake. To build an effective business case network operators must take into account the complexity of the program and its far reaching impact on their business.
The business case validates and supports the transformation activity. As the network operator invests (both capex and opex), the business case demonstrates the feasibility of the exercise and also that the tangible benefits (the return on investment) warrant the expenditures and opportunity cost. IP Transformation isn’t easy, but a well-executed strategy based on a strong business case will result in years of tangible benefits for your business.
IP Transformation: Steps to Success
The first challenge is to justify the costs. It is crucial to determine how the company is going to realize a return on the money invested.
There are 3 essential activities you should complete first in order to build a strong business case:
Build a Better Business Case
In my experience, only those business cases that took into account the ‘big picture’ really stood the test of time, and were not revisited or even scrapped during the delivery program.
The current services portfolio and future roadmap for sales offerings must be understood and modeled. Without it, the company is embarking upon change without understanding its very purpose: what it sells, to whom it sells, where, when and how. This applies equally in strategic industries, such as energy distribution and transportation, where infrastructure services are provided to support business and engineering applications.
Why is this so hard to achieve, and so often ignored? There are several reasons that need to be addressed.
#1. Get the Right Sponsors
Sponsors are often technology focused, and they primarily see the feature roadmap and decommissioning benefits. They tend to ignore the wider organizational stakeholder needs and benefits. The technological benefits of change rarely justify the investment on their own. It takes a holistic set of benefits to make the numbers work.
Also, the portfolio is often fragmented across the business, and pulling together the roadmap is seen as almost impossible. This is not an insignificant undertaking, but it is a necessary cost if the real benefits are to be understood and realized.
#2. Do a Technology Audit
The next step is to understand the current technology baseline, and the level of change that is required. This includes not only the physical network assets, but also the data models, the logical service layer, and the associated OSS and BSS changes.
In many cases, a multi-pronged approach to audit is required. This will cumulatively drive a deeper understanding of the known starting position and give a baseline for planning the investment in network and IT change.
Coordinating these technology efforts, driven by different organizations, but with dependent outcomes, takes significant effort and forethought. Only when they are delivered as a combined view can you truly understand the technology roadmap costs.
#3. Establish Good Governance
In parallel to the network change you must determine the scope and effort required to smoothly and quickly migrate the network and IT operations environments. This audit is driven by a different stakeholder base, with their business-as-usual demands and their own drivers for influencing the network and IT change.
I have witnessed several instances of C-levels operating in ‘splendid isolation’ at this stage, and later wondering why the dependencies between Operations, IT and network change were not planned in when considering the business case.
You must impose strict governance and coordination to plan the roadmap, appease all the stakeholders, and identify the true requirements and costs of operations uplift.
#4. Get Full Corporate Visibility
Any financing should take into account the wider business. What parallel investments are occurring elsewhere? Can they be leveraged, or are they going to impede the change program, and cost the company time and money, or cause blocking dependencies later?
In one particular case, I witnessed HR releasing resources through a funded early retirement plan, only for the change program to hire back those very same resources as contactors. This went on for 18 months, with both programs claiming success against their own measures.
Such company investment programs running in isolation are not uncommon. Early analysis can identify dependencies, and save enormous financial impacts later.
IP Transformation: It’s a Journey
Make your business case first, before you embark on your IP Transformation journey. It gives you the map, which then provides the route and directions for the program’s journey. Like any seasoned traveler, I have learned that a sound map and a route marked with clear waypoints is a pre-requisite before setting out. The white paper, “Better Business Case Management for IP Transformation” outlines these ideas in more detail.
Watch for our next blog, The business case for IP Transformation: Managing the service roadmap.
By Steve Blackshaw, IP Transformation Product Line Management, Alcatel-Lucent
In his role as Senior Director of IP Transformation at Alcatel-Lucent, Steve Blackshaw leads large-scale network evolution and transformation programs for some of the world’s largest telecommunications service providers.
]]>The mining industry is booming thanks not only to natural resource demands in China, but also because every electronic device, including smartphones a lot of the precious materials that miners pull from the earth. For example, an iPhone contains gold, silver, platinum, copper and many rare earth elements like Yttrium, Lanthanum, Neodymium, Gadolinium and Europium.
Keeping these bustling mines efficient requires a highly reliable, accessible, secure and high-performance communications network. The reason is the mines tend to be operational 24/7/365. It is a major factor in why many mines are in the process of or evaluating upgrading their communications networks, since the existing Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, proprietary VHF and PMR options are not keeping pace with mining information interchange demands of all types.
One solution is private, ultra-broadband, as described in a recent TrackTalk posting, LTE for mining: delivering ultra broadband in the middle of nowhere, by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation Segment, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU). Indeed, the reason for the title is somewhat obvious in that mines tend to be in not just remote but very remote locations.
For example, the Rio Tinto West Angelas mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the solution for better connectivity has been a private single and converged ultra-broadband 4G LTE network for its pit fields, railways and ports.
The network, installed in 2013 by Alcatel-Lucent, helps with mission-critical communications for things like in-pit autonomous haulage systems (AHS), autonomous drilling systems (ADS), driverless freight train control, anti-collision systems, in-pit proximity detection, in-pit CCTV, high-precision GPS and an array of telemetry systems and sensors are now integral components of successful mine sites around the world, according to Sens.
Alcatel-Lucent has provided an illustration of a private broadband for mining. While a bit of an eye chart, what stands out is the extent of the IP/MPLS infrastructure along with the wireless links from the mines to the backbone network.Source: Alcatel-Lucent
For Rio Tinto, the performance of its LTE network has led some observers to comment that they have a better mobile signal in the middle of the mine, hundreds of miles from the nearest city, than in their office.
“An LTE network is also contributing to reduced operating costs by using an IP protocol to support all applications on a single converged radio network, and improvements in operational efficiency,” notes Sens.
Private LTE networks and mining are a good fit, as Rio Tinto has demonstrated.
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Unfortunately though, many large enterprises are unable to take advantage of advances in technology due to old or outdated infrastructure and ICT technology silos. In addition, being locked in to one technology vendor often stymies the enterprise from being able to update the tools necessary to increase employee productivity.
For instance, something as simple as developing and deploying a new app is often a frustrating experience, as the enterprise must submit a request to the technology vendor for a new app to be developed, then wait until the vendor adds it to their development queue before finding out when to expect it. This often takes months, if not longer.
In the meantime, instead of waiting for the new app, many employees take the “shadow IT” route. They download rogue (i.e., non-IT-supported) apps that will allow them to move forward with at least some of the functionality they seek, even without IT support. While this work-around may provide some degree of productivity enhancement for the employee, wouldn’t it be better if the enterprise was able to either plug in existing best-of-breed third-party apps or develop and deploy its own apps without having to wait for a vendor to become involved?
Alcatel-Lucent thinks so, which is one of the reasons our new solution, Rapport™ for Large Enterprise, is generating so much interest. Rapport is a private cloud-based communications and collaboration solution designed specifically for the large enterprise.
With Rapport, the communications network becomes a platform for innovation, enabling the creation of new “contextual communications”, where fundamental services such as voice, chat, video conferencing and sharing become functions available to any application, website or connected object. “Rapport liberates large enterprises from the communications technology silos and proprietary vendor offerings that IT departments need to contend with,” according to Bhaskar Gorti, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Platforms business.
With the Rapport platform, application developers are able to access the rich set of client and network open application programming interfaces (APIs) and simple software development kits (SDKs), allowing quick and easy development and deployment of communications services. This accessibility allows the enterprise to deliver innovative communications features to apps, websites and other connected objects, enhancing them with a communications-enabled, contextual communications experience.
Enabling Contextual Communications
Business today is global and 24/7. As such, employees need to be able to communicate with their peers, business associates or clients wherever they are, on whatever device they are using.
One of the most recent developments contributing to this is contextual communications – essentially, having the communications features you need embedded in the tools you use. However, in order to provide these functions to employees, large enterprises need to be able to quickly develop and launch these new contextual applications. Rapport open APIs make it easy to embed real-time communications functions into devices, applications and websites.
If you’re not familiar with contextual communications, here are a few examples of what they might enable your business to do:
Rapport’s REST-based APIs let applications developers create uniquely differentiated communications experiences, depending on the business requirements. This helps large enterprises better serve their employees and customers by building these communications services into the applications, websites and other connected objects they use.
Rapport also provides the enterprise with the option of either developing and deploying their own apps using the Rapport open APIs, or plugging in best-of-breed apps to help meet the needs of employees for the latest services, whether in the office or on the move. With Rapport APIs, it’s about the future of communications.
Unlock Service Innovation
Because Rapport open APIs provide easy access to rich communication and collaboration features, innovation now becomes part of corporate communications. Use Rapport APIs to add ‘communications as a feature’ to existing services and WebRTC client libraries to extend your services to the web. Create compelling new contextual applications with the quality of service users want. Rapport also offers large enterprises the use of our sandbox, a fast prototyping environment, to pre-validate and demo your application and WebRTC client with our Rapport cloud test platform, leveraging IMS technology.
With Rapport, instead of waiting on a vendor, application developers are able to develop and deploy the new communications features, services, applications and innovations the enterprise needs. By tapping into capabilities such as HD voice and video, conferencing, interactive voice and rich communications, developers can now build compelling new communication-enabled apps, helping to increase employee productivity and user satisfaction.
Summary
As you see, Rapport open APIs help the large enterprise break free of technology silos and vendor lock-in by freeing them to develop and deploy the contextual communications services they need, as they need them – instead of waiting on a vendor to tell them what will be available and when. By using Rapport’s open APIs, large enterprises are now able to develop and deploy apps in a real-time manner. What once took months or years can now literally be done in a period of weeks.
For more information on Rapport for Large Enterprise and how it can help your business, please visit the Alcatel-Lucent Rapport for Large Enterprise website or contact your local Alcatel-Lucent sales office.
One of the big promises of UC was consolidating a range of disparate communications technologies and bringing them together both for a single communications experience, and also for easier deployment. Yet, the downside of this consolidation has been perhaps an over-reliance on a single vendor solution. This concentration in a single UC vendor it is limiting the ability of enterprises to adopt the latest technology as it emerges, instead having to wait on their provider or record.
With one vendor providing the entire communications technology, an inconsistency in quality also is emerging, suggests a recent blog post by Brendan Ziolo, Head of Large Enterprise Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, 5 reasons unified communications is hurting large enterprises.
“When there were only a few communications functions, one vendor was able to provide a competent platform for each,” noted Ziolo. “Today however, there are so many options that vendors naturally have functions they excel at and other functions that are far behind what is available in the market.”
Further, UC is reducing the control that enterprise has over its communications technology, and some firms are finding it a challenge to integrate UC platforms after a merger; each firm is deeply embedded with a single solution, and woe to those firms that merge with another and these UC solutions don’t line up. This is more the case with UC than when a range of technologies were used and there was more leeway for mixing and matching.
“Large enterprises are looking for a new alternative to the current unified communications solution,” posits Ziolo. “Many are beginning to look towards more open, cloud-based frameworks that eliminate the challenges associated with vendor lock in and free up the organization to select the best-of-breed apps that meet their business requirements.”
Alcatel-Lucent looks at this and other next steps in the unified communications journey in a recent white paper, Moving beyond Unified Communications. unified communications
UC definitely has delivered advantages such as ease of use. But like most things, it also has come at a cost that wasn’t immediately apparent but as the white paper explains there is a path forward to resolve the problems.
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If you traveled by air this summer, consider yourself lucky if you made it to your destination on time. It was a tough summer for both the airlines and for passengers, as IT issues in both July and August led to widespread delays and flight cancellations in the U.S. and beyond.
Most recently, a software update to a plane routing system at an FAA control center in Leesburg, Va., led to what some are now calling Flypocalypse.
The En Route Automation Modernization system routes planes through 160,000 square miles of airspace over Washington, according to The Washington Post, but on Aug. 15 it was unable to handle that important task. “For several hours, the system that processes flight plans at the center stopped functioning for reasons that are still unclear,” according to the Post.
The result: The delay or cancellation of hundreds of flights nationwide and a sea of frustrated passengers.
The August event followed by just more than a month another airline system glitch that had even more widespread repercussions.
In early July, the busiest month of the year for air travel, a router malfunction in United Airlines’ reservation system led to big delays at the company’s Chicago, Denver, and Houston hubs – negatively impacting a reported 400,000 passengers.
As happened during the August event, many stranded passengers in July lit up social media with their complaints.
The problem with the system – which in addition to selling tickets is used to create gate assignments, manage aircraft movement, schedule pilots and flight attendants, and track maintenance schedules – led United Airlines to ground all its planes from 8 to 9:49 a.m. on July 8, according to The Washington Post, which noted the airline also grounded several flights the previous month.
Given the complexity of predicting weather, of airplanes themselves, and of all the people and systems involved in scheduling planes for takeoff and orchestrating them en route and at landing, it’s kind of amazing that things work as well as they do most of the time. But it’s tough to have that perspective when you’re a passenger who’s been waiting for hours at the airport, or a stakeholder in an airline, for which time is money.
The good news is that there are proven technologies in which airlines, some of which are reporting record profits, can invest to make their systems – and in turn, their businesses – more reliable.
One of those solutions for helping make aviation travel less chaotic is IP/MPLS services.
IP/MPLS is a communications network architecture that can prevent problems like minor router failures from grounding flights, noted Thierry Sens, marketing director of transportation and oil & gas segments for Alcatel-Lucent. In a July blog, Don’t let unreliable IP routers ruin your airline’s reputation, Sens notes that IP/MPLS offers high network availability and resiliency via its fast reroute, link aggregation group, non-stop routing, and non-stop services capabilities.
The technology also features embedded security via network access control, network group, encryption, and traffic anomaly detection. That’s important in this day and age of frequent and high-profile network and system breaches, as we need to closely guard the key infrastructure that is our transportation system, and protect the passengers and airline employees.
]]>I crossed the English Channel to spend a few days in Ipswich. Not to explore its beautiful port but to participate in the hackathon organized by BT, hosted by its Innovation Hub in Adastral Park (7th to 9th July).
Hackathons are flourishing these days. These are fast, dynamic, creative
events in which software developers collaborate intensively around ideation and prototyping with specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and on dedicated themes such as mobile apps, internet of things, home automation, connected car, etc.
BT leveraged our Rapport APIs and Rapport Sandbox to run their first hackahon. Rapport is our communications software platform, used by service providers and large enterprises to deliver voice, video and messaging.
The first objective of the hackathon was to educate the BT community about the power of Rapport APIs. The second objective was to demonstrate how BT’s Future Voice (FV) platform, equipped with Alcatel-Lucent Rapport APIs and opened up to keen BT developers, can easily create new value added services to improve the user experience and generate new revenue streams. The third objective was to test the process for BT’s external hackathons.
More than 100 BT developers, architects, usability managers and product managers, competing as 10 teams and supported on-site by experts from Alcatel-Lucent, worked for 3 days with passion, energy and a great deal of creativity. Using our Rapport Sandbox’s rich set of WebRTC client APIs and network APIs, the teams defined, designed and delivered many innovative service concept demos and prototypes! The winning teams built a "Safe Home" service prototype which brings together the Internet Of Things (IoT), and more particularly the home connected objects, with consumer communications.
Many senior BT executives visited the hackathon, including Karl Penaluna, President of 21C Global Networks and Computing Infrastructure at BT. Tim Shaw, BT's Director of Voice & Multimedia said "The Hackathon has been a great success. We have driven a change in our understanding of the potential of communications and have built working prototypes that demonstrate the power of APIs. We will use this understanding to drive the value of our propositions to truly exceed what the customer expects from how they communicate."
Thanks to Liam Connors from BT for the outstanding organization of the event! We are now looking forward BT’s next hackathon for external developers.
From left to right:
G. Duboué (Alcatel-Lucent)
K. Penaluna (BT)
T. Shaw (BT)
R. Baker (Alcatel-Lucent)
M. Duffy (Alcatel-Lucent)
L. Connors (BT)
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For more than a century, the massive Paris Metro has been enabling commuters and tourists to easily travel across the French capital. Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), which operates the metro network, employs roughly 54,000 employees and has yearly revenue of more than €5 billion ($5.43 billion). As part of the Grand Paris initiative, which has support from several levels of government, RATP is planning:
However, getting there means having a next generation communications network. With that in mind, the Paris Metro is converging its five communications networks into a single IP/MPLS network. Instead of separate networks for TETRA, CCTV, telephony, passenger info and IT, RATP is boldly moving ahead with a converged network aided by the expertise of Alcatel-Lucent.
“By converging our five separate legacy networks into one single IP/MPLS network,” noted Patrick Goasdoué, director of telecommunications for RATP in a recent Alcatel-Lucent interactive case study, Signaling Change for the Paris Metro, “We will not only reduce our maintenance costs, but also improve our operations.”
Companies often struggle with moving forward thanks to a network of fragmented systems that don’t effectively integrate with each other. With its expansion plans, RATP saw the opportunity to fix its own fragmentation issue as it expanded its metro network. This was a perfect time to migrate to IP/MPLS, which moves all communications over a common IP backbone.
The advantage of converging networks into one system extends far beyond improved efficiency, security and control, as Alcatel-Lucent noted in the case study. IP/MPLS not only handles communications traffic today, but it also makes future expansion easier; it can handle new applications and services, manage even more lines, trains and CCTV coverage, and be ready for whatever new innovations emerge in the next few years.
At the same time as it simplifies the communications network and makes it future-proof, the move to IP/MPLS will enable the Paris Metro to significantly reduce congestion and pollution, combat urban sprawl and agricultural encroachment, promote the economic development of the surrounding region and contribute to France's reputation as worldwide leaders in economic progress.
Not a bad trick for an old dog.
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In North America, the Positive Train Control (PTC) system was mandated by the United States federal government in 2008 for railway lines carrying passengers and hazardous materials. Yet, the government deadline to have 96,500 km of track with the feature by 2015 will not be met.
Similarly, the European Train Control System (ETCS) in Europe, part of the Europe Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS), is currently only deployed on 5000 km of track. The EU is aiming for a rollout on Europe’s 68,000km core network by 2030, and there is a long way still to go.
“With the US government set to introduce a five-year extension of the PTC bill by the end of 2015, and the EU turning the screw on ETCS deployment, this is not going away,” noted a recent blog post, Unlocking the benefits of train control with IP/MPLS, by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation Segment, Alcatel-Lucent. Sens, explained that, “Railways should therefore embrace the respective mandates as an opportunity to improve their network architecture and technology, specifically by introducing IP/MPLS.”
Signaling and train control systems require strict reliability, resiliency, performance and security, as they are mission-critical communications. IP/MPLS architecture is perfectly suited for the task.
By combining IP/MPLS routers, IP/MPLS switches, optical switches, packet microwave and LTE radio networks, railway operators also can build a converged IP/MPLS network to host both mission-critical signaling systems and additional features desired by operators such as CCTV networks and passenger Wi-Fi. While the cost of rolling out the required infrastructure to support these train control mandates is large, railway operators can at least use the opportunity to overhaul their communication systems with modern technology.
Refer in Portugal and Trafikverket (previously Banverket) in Sweden, for instance, are deploying IP/MPLS to support their signaling applications while introducing features such as synchronous Ethernet, cyber-attack protection, non-stop routing, non-stop services and fast reroute.
“These railways are well placed to reap the rewards of improved interoperability, capacity, reliability and safety by hosting enhanced train control on IP/MPLS,” observed Sens. And, Alcatel-Lucent is working with these railway operators on the design and rollout of the systems based on IP/MPLS.
Meeting the regulatory demand for automatic safety features on railways is not quick or easy. But the benefits can be great for railways that do, and next generation communications is the foundation for enabling them to meet future requirements as well as improve operational excellence and the customer experience.
]]>A recent Alcatel-Lucent application note, The large enterprise has changed, gave an interesting snapshot of large enterprise IT today.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent, The large enterprise has changed
Based on this, it stressed that large enterprises have networking and communications infrastructure needs that are surprisingly similar to those of the network operators themselves, thanks to the growing importance of having employees connected with the bandwidth, security and reliability they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
What this means is that large enterprises should start thinking like a network operator. This includes having telecom-grade IP platform infrastructure in place to support employee connectivity.
Specifically, large enterprise should think about using data center automation that can take advantage of technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN). With something like Alcatel-Lucent’s Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, large enterprises can deliver SDN capabilities including centralized, policy-driven networking, simplified configuration and compliance automation.
Large enterprises also should have virtualized network services that can leverage SDN to create wide area networks (WANs) that can use best of breed technology and avoid proprietary lock-in.
In terms of the cloud, large enterprises are overwhelmingly deploying private clouds. Large enterprises should make sure they have a turnkey solution in place to make those deployments easy and also flexible enough to support web-based applications and mobile apps.
In thinking like telecoms, large enterprises additionally should consider optical transport and data center interconnect.
Optical transport delivers the bandwidth and speed that large enterprises need to keep up with network demand, and data center interconnect delivers the flexibility and capacity for faster service turn-up and assured business continuity while improving asset utilization and lowering costs. Data center interconnect brings scalable, secure, high-performing, multi-site data center connectivity for the cloud era.
Network connectivity is a key component of every business, especially for large enterprises. As a result, businesses need to learn from network operators and consider investing in similar technologies when it comes to their own connectivity projects.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is widely used by railways, highways management, power utilities and the oil & gas industry, among others. It brings an end-to-end supervisory system which acquires data from the field through Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) or Intelligent Electrical Devices (IEDs) and connects it to sensors through a communications network.
The oil industry employs SCADA technology to monitor offshore and onshore extraction, for instance.
Some pundits are predicting the end of SCADA in the near future. However, a recent TrackTalk article by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation, Oil & Gas Segments, Alcatel-Lucent, entitled with the same question posed above, Is M2M killing SCADA?, arrives at a different answer. Sens argues that SCADA instead will adapt and include M2M, which is closely related to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) megatrend currently sweeping the consumer world.
After three-generations of SCADA (standalone SCADA, distributed SCADA and networked SCADA), industries such as the railways are now using M2M for part of their SCADA needs.
“M2M is revolutionizing SCADA by offering standardization and openness,” noted Sens. “Indeed several communication protocols between a backend and a machine have been standardised by the Open Mobile Alliance and the Broadband Forum. M2M is also providing scalability, interoperability, and enhanced security by introducing the concept of middleware.”
With middleware, the fragmented SCADA solutions with individual sensors talking only to their respective backend applications can be eliminated.
“Middleware collects, syndicates and manages all flows using open communication standards and exposes the data through standard APIs and Web Services,” noted Sens. “This has enabled the development of business applications and business analytics software on top of this middleware which can compute the information collected from millions of devices.”
Once example of this is the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). They have been pioneering the use of M2M to improve the efficiency of applications in use on 3039km of lines across its network with the ultimate goal of reducing costs by up to 15 percent by 2018. Their step-by-step rollout is looking to deliver efficiency savings and an improvement in operations, and does not emphasize a single technology or specific area; it covers telecoms, operations in areas such as point maintenance, fibre optic systems and rolling stock fleet monitoring, as well as other areas.
“M2M is considered the next phase in the evolution of SCADA and logical platform for an upgrade when the time is right,” concludes the Alcatel-Lucent blog post on the topic. “It finally offers a standardized, scalable, inter-operable and future-proof solution that does not tie a customer to a single supplier but still delivers the improved efficiency and reduced costs associated with SCADA applications over the past 40 years.”
And that’s a good thing.
]]>Facilities-based service providers that own the access network are ideally positioned to distribute video both today and in the future, according to Chris Croupe, who works in strategic marketing at Alcatel-Lucent. Video comes in a variety of forms, its applications continue to expand, and this kind of content continues to multiply, Croupe notes in his recent TechZine posting, Future of video content: Evolution toward 2020.
Calls leveraging video have become widespread, he adds, noting that 59 percent of smartphone users under 35 years of age make at least one video call a month, and 37 percent of this group does so at least once a week.
Online video is also multiplying in terms of both available content and its applications. While online video caught on primarily a source of entertainment. (Do you remember watching one of the popular cat playing piano YouTube videos?) Today, it’s also commonly used in business. Indeed, most major companies, and many other organizations of various sizes, are leveraging online video to promote their brands and educate customers on their offerings. Alcatel-Lucent is one example of this, Croupe says, note the company’s New Guy at the Office series.
Meanwhile, the quality of video continues to improve, with 4k Ultra-HD technology adoption expanding by camera and TV manufacturers, and creators of content, says Croupe.
All of the above have contributed to a large upswing in global bandwidth consumption, which Bell Labs expects to be in the neighborhood of 1 Zb a year this year and to reach 4.3 Zb a year by 2020.
New connected TVs and other devices that make it possible for viewers to access video streams delivered over their television also make it possible for service providers like the telcos to make their mark in the over-the-top video space with content and video delivery networks. However, OTT video is just part of the opportunity going forward, and perhaps not as singularly important as it may seem, Croupe argues.
As the posting points out, while the way in which we consume video continues to evolve and expand beyond the TV, the television set remains the primary device of choice for watching video across different genres (comedy, drama, documentaries, movies, news, sports) of content. Indeed short form content is the only type of content for which the TV is not the preferred device for watching video, according to Alcatel-Lucent.
While we hear a lot about the wild growth and growing business for OTT streaming services, revenues in this space are markedly lower than those from linear video service providers on a global basis, according to Alcatel-Lucent. OTT services revenues do have high growth rates, but that’s not difficult considering that they started from zero.
Alcatel-Lucent also points out that video streaming providers depend upon high-bandwidth connections. Without them, users will abandon such services.
“Going forward, some content will be delivered as part of a linear package and other content will be streamed in an on demand fashion,” says Croupe.
“Operators can use local and consumer contextual data to provide discovery and delivery options for their customers and provide individually curated ads based upon the manner in which the content is being consumed and other consumer data where permitted,” he adds. “Overall, we believe the service provider’s position in video content delivery will remain extremely strong.”
Given all of the concerns about OTT encroachment on value-added services, particularly video ones, the Alcatel-Lucent message should be welcome news to communications service providers assuming they embrace the opportunities ahead and understand not just the competition but cooperation that will enable them to remain as critical parts of the evolving video-centric world.
]]>Alcatel-Lucent has developed its Network Services Platform (NSP) as a unified solution for creating agility in delivering network services. NSP brings efficiency and flexibility to the front-end problems of new service creation and the immediately downstream problems of operating those services efficiently and intelligently in a multilayer, multidomain, multivendor network. It does so in a unified and holistically designed solution.
Remarkable gains have been made in the cloud computing community to create and deploy new services efficiently and at scale. It’s also true that a significant impediment to service delivery is the rigidity of networks we deploy and processes used to define and instantiate services being offered.
A great deal of energy has been expended in recent years to enhance the flexibility of networks. Solutions have begun to appear that address parts of the problem, but to date they have been constrained to a particular function or domain and haven’t actually solved the whole agile service delivery problem for networks.
Until the Alcatel-Lucent NSP.
NSP breaks the OSS/BSS logjam in network service creation with the use of open RESTful APIs northbound for OSS and BSS integration and with use of important data modeling standards and templates for network and service representation. Using these abstractions allows services and networks to be represented once to multiple OSS and BSS applications, eliminating the need to define the same service multiple times to different modules so they can talk to a range of vendors’ platforms.
NSP enhances this streamlining by enabling service policies and tenant contexts to be associated with the newly defined services and applied broadly across the target network infrastructure.
As we discovered in the analysis of developing a new bandwidth calendaring service offering in a representative operator case, NSP brings improvements over 50 percent compared to present modes of operation in both calendar time required to define the new service offering and the number of resources needed to define the service in the OSS and BSS contexts.
As the service templates travel southbound they are converted by a versatile mediation engine into the semantics and formats needed to work with each IP/MPLS and optical network platform being managed. This auto-conversion dramatically simplifies and streamlines the provisioning process for the service offerings across network layers, vendors and domains.
Communication southbound with NSP is enabled by support of multiple standard protocols important in the multivendor environment it’s designed for: BGP-LS, PCEP, NETCONF, and SNMP today, with OpenFlow on the horizon for cases where it’s used. Special cases for vendor CLI support are also included to continue the simplification.
On top of protocol versatility, Alcatel-Lucent has integrated functionality derived from 1,000s of operator deployments in both optical and IP/MPLS layers to enhance NSP’s value. For example, three distinct path computation engines are available in NSP for use as the operator requires. A packet-oriented PCE (PCE-P) for use with IP/MPLS paths, an optically-oriented PCE (PCE-T) for use with optical paths, and a multilayer PCE (PCE-X) for use in multilayer path optimization are included. PCEs are used to define paths in line with service policies at provisioning time, and as operations progress KPIs are monitored in real time to determine if adjustments of any sort are called for.
Going further, Alcatel-Lucent has incorporated unique and innovative algorithms for resource optimization such as its self-tuned adaptive routing for LSPs that helps the network adapt allocations in real time according to policies and service delivery needs, producing further efficiencies and revenue-generating capacity.
From this profile we can see Alcatel-Lucent is applying its vision and expertise to deliver a solution that supplies the missing link with NSP in solving the wide area network agility problem. Its combination of functions has all the attributes for turning WANs into agile service delivery platforms. It’s a platform that can help turn aspirations into achievements in new service deliveries. It should be a major contributor to many operators improving their networks to become as agile as the cloud.
Paul's work explores transformations under way in SDN, NFV, cloud computing and service orchestration in service provider environments. Use cases from data center to core, metro, access and customer premises are engaged. New architectural developments and implications for vendor and operator designs are analyzed. Syndicated research analyzes market developments, forecasts market sizes, and evaluates market shares of participating vendors in key product categories. Custom research and analysis helps clients evaluate plans related to these transformations, and implement their offerings in the market. Prior to joining ACG Mr. Parker-Johnson led Juniper Networks’ cloud computing solution business enabling end-to-end cloud offerings for service providers and enterprises of multiple sizes and scale.
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