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By Edouard Karam

Improved delivery, better visibility: How Accedian and VMware are working together to help CSPs navigate the 5G world

Enabling 5G requires a major operational shift for service providers. A revenue-generating 5G network and a satisfying user experience will depend on quality of service management. Providers need to simplify ways for developers, enterprises, and MVNOs to do business. 

With this collaborative effort, we are switching from a model where a service’s capabilities are defined by the network to one where the requirements of the service create a specially designed network.

As Stephen Spellicy, the vice president of product marketing and solutions for VMware’s telco and edge cloud business unit, puts it, “Imagine a network that simplifies consumption of service provider resources in the same way Amazon Prime simplified the consumption of consumer goods and streaming content.”

Network-as-a-Service – NaaS – will do just that.

Standardizing and simplifying ways to innovate and consume the network based on the specific needs of the application is certainly a shift from current operational models. What does this mean for CSPs? Let’s dig in. 

Partnering to bring deeper visibility and insight for service providers

Accedian is integrating its service assurance CNF and Skylight platform to be part of the VMware Telco Cloud offering. The goal? To assist CSPs in meeting the most demanding SLAs across multi-cloud, multi-vendor, and multi domain networks.

With the integration, VMware gains additional service assurance capability at the infrastructure layer. Through this integration, VMware will be able to deliver a single solution providing end-to-end, full-stack network and application assurance, addressing markets such as SD-WAN, Open RAN, Private 5G, and multi-access edge computing (MEC).

Benefits for service providers

Accedian Skylight delivers improved network visibility among diverse infrastructure (including cell sites, far edge, near edge and core), enabling VMware to correlate network visibility to application performance. 

Based on our years of experience in the telco and enterprise assurance markets, Accedian Skylight extracts real-time insight about end-user experience from the most granular, detailed performance data available on the market.

Through this collaboration, CSPs will receive:

  • A single solution that delivers end-to-end, full-stack network and application assurance 
  • End-customer portals that enable enhanced transparency on delivered service levels for customers – and the capability for additional monetization
  • Open and standardized APIs that facilitate data ingestion from third-party sources to further contextualize insight and help with rapid decision-making for capacity planning and when customer experience is impacted

Likewise, here’s what telco cloud customers gain from the partnership:

  • Better network visibility
  • Quick time to resolution
  • Ability to predict network degradation

These factors will enable better network performance, improving the experience for service providers and their enterprise customers.

Enabling the NaaS model

With this collaborative effort, we are switching from a model where a service’s capabilities are defined by the network to one where the requirements of the service create a specially designed network. Using our measurement telemetry, CSPs will be able to gain insight into NaaS availability, performance, and quality of experience (QoE) while removing network complexity. This delivers the visibility needed to optimize user experiences for use cases requiring low latency or quick response times.  

It’s incredibly difficult to manage the enormous multi-cloud, multi-vendor, multi-domain settings alongside a vast ecosystem of apps, but it’s table stakes for customers today. Our Skylight platform gives network operations and IT teams the most detailed view across these many environments so they can handle possible threats and performance issues right away. Through our partnership with VMware, we’re combining our individual capabilities to give CSPs and their enterprise end customers better performance and visibility.