How Cisco and Accedian are enabling CSPs to offer Transport Slice SLAs for differentiated, high-margin service offerings

Written by:
Michael Rezek, VP of Business Development, Accedian – Connect with Michael on LinkedIn
John Mullooly, Distinguished Architect at Cisco – Connect with John on LinkedIn

It has been amazing to watch how rapidly the public cloud providers have grown their businesses based on providing simplified, on-demand services over the last 15 years while focusing on delivering user “outcomes” defined by user intent. 

It has been written in the past that the traditional communications service providers’ (CSPs) business models and margins have been threatened by the “hyper-scalers”. The threat is one of being relegated to a “commodity pipe provider”, like a public utility, with no way to differentiate services with higher margins. This is what we have referred to as the “threat of disintermediation” as telecom assets are converged with both public and private cloud infrastructure. 

Game on: those who control the SLA, control service monetization 

Hyper-scalers have a proven history of automating service provisioning and simplifying complexity for developers who use their infrastructure. API centricity and abstracted service interfaces in the cloud environment have created an expectation of services being delivered “on-demand”. So, it’s “game on” because the future owner of service monetization will be the one who controls the service level agreement (SLA) with the customer. 

And this battle is taking place where the architecture has never been more complex with emerging 5G and wireline services being delivered over multi-cloud, multi-domain, and even multi-operator architectures. 

An industry first: enabling CSPs to automate provisioning of infrastructure and assurance SLOs

What we are excited about is that for the first time in the industry, through the partnership of Cisco and Accedian, we are offering a unified view to enable CSPs to not only automate the provisioning of the infrastructure, but to provide automated assurance for the service level objective (SLO) portion of the SLA (the “measurable” part of the SLA). 

As discussed in the blog post, Perspectives on the Future of SP Networking: Intent and Outcome Based Transport Service Automation, the IETF defines the YANG model for Transport Slicing where the SLA is a combination of SLOs and SLEs (service level expectations). SLOs/SLEs are a declarative approach to describe a user’s “intent” or “outcome”, which defines the what, not the how. 

Cisco brings its industry-leading, Segment Routing (SR), BGP-based VPNs, QoS platforms and controller architecture – Crosswork™ – and possesses a rich store house of path computation algorithms and insights. 

Accedian brings a world-class performance monitoring, analytics, and service assurance platform, Skylight, which provides real-time service visibility, health and insights to customers on service quality across even the most complex infrastructures. 

Real-time visibility, health and insights drives ‘on-demand’ 

In addition to combining the insights from Crosswork and Skylight’s performance analytics, Skylight provides real-time SLO visibility –“is the SLA, being met?” This unified capability enables our CSP customers to provide Transport Slicing services with traffic-engineered SLAs (meeting outcome-based SLOs/SLEs) thereby enabling differentiated services for driving higher revenue, margins, and EBITDA. 

Cisco‘s segment routing and control architecture addresses the “on demand” service experience to which customers have become accustomed to the hyper-scalers. Accedian’s Skylight performance monitoring, analytics and assurance platform enables customers to get a real time view of how the service is meeting the SLOs through its SLA portal. 

To learn more about the joint Cisco Crosswork and Accedian Skylight solution, download the Appledore Research: Intent-Based Networking ‘Automated Assurance’s critical success factor’ or download the solution review. We will also be showcasing the joint solution at the following upcoming events:

• Cisco Live in Las Vegas, June 4-8 – register here

Contributing Author:

John Mullooly
Distinguished Architect, SP Technology and Architecture, Cisco

John Mullooly is a Distinguished Architect at Cisco Systems, joining in 1998 with focus on the Service Provider market. He is a recognized and accomplished technology leader with 30+ years of experience in computer/IP network design, deployment, and consulting to large SPs (AT&T, etc.) and Enterprise customers. He has extensive technical expertise in Network Design, IP Routing, MPLS/SR, L3/L2 VPN’s, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), NFV Orchestration (NFVO), Openstack, Cloud Networking, Kubernetes, NETCONF/YANG and Service Automation. He is a leading contributor to Cisco’s Network Slicing architectural vision, based on multi-domain and intent-based service modeled principles, and has contributed to the IETF’s work to drive better standardization in this area. John previously held senior technology roles at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Solutions. He has obtained BS/MS degrees in Electrical Engineering, various industry certifications including multiple CCIEs (#3659), AWS Solution Architecture, AWS Advanced Networking and Certified Kubernetes Administration (CKA). He holds ten patents in the areas of computer networking and IP network services and is an adjunct professor in the Engineering & Technology Department at Brookdale Community College.