This week, TeleGeography Explains the Internet tackles automation from a carrier perspective with the help of Jeremy Villalobos, COO of Orchest (formerly known as GoldConnect).
What is it? How is it being used in telecom? And why is it crucial that carriers move toward automation? Of course, we had to tie in the impact on the enterprise WAN and the future of automation, including practical uses for blockchain telecom.
Jeremy and I had a lot of fun recording this episode, and I think you'll find it useful for discussing how the business will inevitably change over the next few years.
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Key Takeaways
Automation is Essential for Streamlining and Enhancing Customer Experience
Carrier service automation involves adopting or creating technology to streamline business processes within an organization. This can significantly improve efficiency, making carriers leaner.
But the ultimate goal is to provide a much better experience to clients.
Technology can handle the actual process, allowing people to focus on business aspects. Examples of manual processes that automation addresses include the lengthy sales process involving CRM, sales engineers, and price specialists, which can currently take weeks or even months.
Automation aims to eliminate manual steps like picking up the phone or using faxes. It reduces friction and transaction costs by automating tasks like feasibility analysis and quoting, which can be done by algorithms and systems in minutes rather than weeks or months. This isn't about replacing humans, but making their interactions more efficient and allowing them to concentrate on their actual, productive roles, such as supporting new projects or building solutions.
Inter-Carrier Collaboration and Standardization are Crucial for Industry-Wide Automation
While automation is important within a single carrier's organization, a critical aspect, especially in the wholesale business, is the interaction between carriers who buy and sell from each other and exchange a lot of data.
Automation is about treating reliable data that can be used internally and shared with partners with confidence. However, automation adoption, particularly regarding APIs and having reliable data in the back-end systems, is currently very small among many carriers, for example, an estimated 98% in Latin America are not embracing automation or APIs effectively.
Overcoming the challenge of legacy systems is also a significant hurdle for large carriers. Organizations like MEF play an incredibly important role in standardizing API formats (such as LSO Sonata) to create a common language that allows systems from different carriers to communicate easily, reducing the time it takes to establish API connections from months to potentially days. This standardization helps the entire industry move forward.
Embracing Automation is Necessary for Meeting Market Demands
Carriers who do not embrace automation are likely to face significant issues in the future. The market expects to be able to procure network services more easily, similar to how other services like software are bought online, potentially through portals or apps, rather than through lengthy contractual negotiations.
While automating the "last mile" as physical limitations, automating interactions between data centers is more feasible due to existing deployed capacity and systems.
The increasing demand for bandwidth, driven by trends like video conferencing and cloud computing, means carriers need to use their resources to meet this demand efficiently rather than spending time on manual facilitation processes that could be automated.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
