Enterprise customers demands from communication service providers (CSPs) are high and rapidly evolving. Network as a Service (NaaS) is an exciting new opportunity for CSPs to offer the crucial enterprise segment. Not only does NaaS revolutionize the network, but it also delivers a service that improves enterprise customer experience and retention as organizations widely migrate to the cloud consumption model.
What Exactly Is Network as a Service?
NaaS enables customers to purchase network and value-added services, as well as computing and network resources as a service, from CSPs instead of doing it by themselves. It’s the ultimate solution for enterprises to keep up with ever-changing business requirements, new business applications and rapid changes in technologies and security threats, all while reducing costs. NaaS enables enterprise network and IT specialists to focus on core business needs instead of being occupied endlessly with building, maintaining and updating WAN along with networking solutions and applications.
In essence, NaaS is presented to the enterprise customer along with a marketplace of services and applications in a single self-service portal. Enterprise customers can then order and co-manage their services on demand to enhance agility and scalability capabilities. Value-added applications and infrastructure can be bought and allocated in near real time. Examples include managed SD-WAN, security and unified communication as a service, as well as cloud computing, data centers, infrastructure and even third-party virtual network functions (VNFs) and applications.
What Does Network as a Service Offer to Enterprise?
Enterprises care about delivering their solutions quickly to their end customers, whose demands are also continuing to evolve and increase. The do-it-yourself approach has been preferred for decades now. But the transformation efforts sweeping through enterprises worldwide and the shift to cloud are causing a fundamental rethink of this approach. In this rapidly changing atmosphere, most enterprises simply cannot afford to take the time to build and maintain their networks by themselves if they want to keep up with their competition and customers’ expectations.
By combining secure SD-WAN connectivity with service lifecycle management automation, self-service portal and a value-added services marketplace, CSPs are offering enterprise:
- Enhanced choice
- Increased agility
- Network operation simplicity
- Cost reduction
Enterprise datacenters can’t compete with the capabilities and the pace of innovation delivered by the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Similarly, if Enterprises opt to build their own SD-WAN and next-generation networking and security services, none will be as complete or agile, nor will they support as many functions and capabilities as those delivered by CSPs as a managed NaaS service.
What Does Network as a Service Enable for CSPs?
By increasing their network flexibility through virtualization and automation CSPs can deliver exactly what is needed by their demanding enterprise customers, and thus elevate themselves in the eyes of their customers and improve their retention. CSPs are now able to provide greater value to customers, which increases their “stickiness” through bundling services that will support their customers’ cloud and digital transformations.
Not only can CSPs deliver increasing levels of agility and speed to enterprises, but they can also improve their own business success. By offering NaaS to businesses, service providers increase their revenue streams and time-to-market efficiency. With online portals, customers can access new services, applications and tools immediately. Automation of fulfilment in this way eliminates time-consuming and costly manual processes to further increase the customer experience.
Case Study: Tier1 APAC Operator Leverages Amdocs’ NaaS Solution
To better illustrate exactly how NaaS can serve enterprise, a Tier1 APAC operator implemented Amdocs’ solution and serves as a useful case study.
Before embarking on the path to NaaS, the operator’s services were designed with physical network functions plugged into rigid physical networks, which were siloed from the operational support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS). Provisioning a new service was largely manual and required the operator to send technicians into the field to install and configure the equipment.
This resulted in:
- Long timelines to provision services and correct problems
- Higher operational costs than necessary
- Slower innovation
- Limited agility
In order to successfully transform their service offerings and expand them to mid-sized enterprises and small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs), the operator recognized that automation would be central to providing a better customer experience with the ever-increasing demand for new services. The operator’ NaaS offering includes managed SD-WAN services and a variety of security, networking and unified communication services, which are based on VNFs that are deployed on virtualized CPE (vCPE) or the operator telco cloud.
The operator was aiming to increase agility, flexibility and efficiency largely by eliminating manual processes and integrating their OSS, BSS and the network. There were three main business objectives:
- Automate operations and reduce operational expenses
- Increase revenue by expanding the market
- Innovate faster and shorten time to market
Case Study Results Using Amdocs’ Scalable Solution
The Amdocs’ programmable NaaS solution for the operator, powered by the Linux Foundation’s Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP), is used to automate network service operations and processes across multiple network domains.
The solution, NFV Orchestration, is integrated with existing BSS and OSS to fully automate the ordering of products and services. This enables business customers to take full advantage of the self-service portal and marketplace for the ordering, provisioning and monitoring of network and value-added services.
Using the Amdocs’ solution, previously manual service processes are fully automated. Taking it one step further, the solution streamlines the onboarding, testing and certification of VNFs into the system, dramatically shrinking time to market.
The implementation of NaaS offering will enable the operator to expand their customer base to include mid-sized enterprises and SMBs, and the new portal will ease the offering of additional VASs and virtual network services.
NaaS Is an Emerging Opportunity for Service Providers to Begin Harnessing Today
Service providers who wish to expand their offerings for enterprise customers need to start looking into NaaS. As those customers seek to respond to dynamic business needs faster, identify additional ways to cut costs and have more control over their network, NaaS provides the solution and elevates the relationship between CSPs and their customers.
CSPs can accelerate their network services transformation and reduce their investment by implementing field-proven technology from advanced software and services providers, such as Amdocs.
To stay ahead of the curve, protect their position and provide scalable services and solutions to enterprise customers, NaaS is the way forward. Service providers offering NaaS are helping enterprises focus on the capabilities their business needs to thrive by taking advantage of the latest technologies that support digital and cloud transformation.
To learn more visit www.amdocs.com/naas