Nextgen Order Fulfillment: Future-proofing your business for change

When describing our NextGen Order Orchestration and Fulfillment solution, I like to use one word - Future-Proofing. Future-proofing what and against what, you may ask? The quick answer is: Change.

For any telecom operator, whether you're an emerging greenfield or wholesale provider or have been in business for decades, one thing is certain: Change is inevitable. Market, operational, financial, technical, or regulatory challenges will arise, requiring you to adapt your business to retain customers or seize new business opportunities.

Network consolidations through acquisitions and mergers force many operators to reevaluate their IT stack, putting legacy systems to the test.

The ability to introduce new services and scale operations efficiently determines competitive success. You may need to replace your invoicing platform to improve the customer experience. Perhaps you decide to introduce a new network vendor for technological advancements. Or maybe your current CPE shipping solution is no longer efficient.

Change is often complex. Change is often expensive - especially when your core BSS/OSS stack must evolve to meet new demands. This is what our NextGen Order Fulfillment is designed to address. The focus is not just on adopting new technologies but on enabling businesses to adapt swiftly and sustainably to new challenges.

The Three Pillars of NextGen Order Fulfillment

I like to highlight three key aspects that define the essence of our new fulfillment platform:

• Agility – The ability to respond to new business opportunities and introduce new technologies and services. This requires the ability to easily update workflows and quickly test and deploy changes.

• Scalability – The capacity to expand your network, customer base, and product portfolio as your business grows. The future is cloud-enabled solutions, whether deployed in a private or public cloud.

• Cost-Efficiency – Ensuring that you can update business flows and conform to new standards without overwhelming costs. If making necessary changes is too costly, operators risk falling behind the competition.

The ultimate goal of NextGen is to give operators the power to handle operational and business challenges more efficiently. This means the ability to deliver on new opportunities, test services, and develop new business models - ensuring seamless growth without creating a spaghetti of integrations and processes.

Key Challenges and Opportunities

1. Vendor Flexibility and Rapid Integrations

A significant challenge for operators is how quickly and easily they can replace vendors or introduce new ones into their network or business layers. Legacy systems often require costly, time-consuming integrations, creating bottlenecks and increasing operational risks. NextGen Order Fulfillment solves this by:

• Utilizing Standardized Protocols such as NETCONF/YANG to streamline vendor provisioning and monitoring in the network domain. Ultimately, this makes your entire BSS/OSS stack vendor-agnostic, transforming vendor selection into a plug-and-play process.

• Enabling TM Forum Open APIs to ensure interoperability across different vendor solutions in the business domain. By choosing a fulfillment platform built on TM Forum information model standards and exposing Open APIs, the cost of integrating and replacing vendors can be greatly reduced.

2. Accelerating New Service Development

Network Operators and Retail Service Providers must be able to introduce new technologies and services quickly to capitalize on market opportunities. Whether transitioning from retail to wholesale, from wholesale to B2B, or simply offering new products and services to existing customers, your future service fulfillment platform should enable:

• Intent-Based Communication between all layers, simplifying workflow reconfiguration and eliminating manual inefficiencies and errors. Intent-based is the way to go if you seek a solution that is truly built on a decoupled architecture with a high degree of automation.

• Cloud-Native Solutions for scalability, allowing operators to expand their existing customer base and explore new business models without encountering limitations in their BSS/OSS stack.

The Quest for Future-Proofing

In essence, to achieve these objectives, our new platform is built to avoid:

• Integration Chaos: Instead of creating a tangled mess of custom interfaces and tweaks, our architecture enables clean separation between layers and incorporates common standards.

• Scalability Roadblocks: The architecture ensures that as the business grows, systems and processes can expand efficiently, maintaining control over your operations.

Technology as an Enabler, Not the Goal

NextGen is not about delivering cutting-edge technologies for their own sake. Instead, technologies are the means to an end: enabling operators to regain control of their processes and networks.

• NETCONF/YANG ensures standardized and simplified provisioning and monitoring, making network deployment and vendor replacement more manageable.

• TM Forum Open APIs allow seamless integration and orchestration across different platforms and software vendors.

• Intent-Based Approach ensures a layered architecture with decoupled components.

• Cloud-Native architectures provide load balancing, reliability, and long-term scalability.

Conclusion

NextGen Order Fulfillment empower operators with the agility, flexibility, and scalability they need to thrive in an increasingly complex and fast-paced industry. By focusing on automation, interoperability, and cloud technology, businesses can future-proof their operations, unlock new revenue streams, and stay ahead of the competition - without sacrificing efficiency or control. The future of telecom isn't just about adopting new technologies; it's about leveraging them to drive genuine business agility.

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