Building Realistic Automation Roadmap for Telco Customers
To bring business value from automation the IP Networks Automation should be considered together with Cloud Automation.
Following are the realistic targets of such E2E Automation that consider both domains with a E2E view through Service and E2E Service Orchestration
Targets for Real Automation
Below should be some real targets to achieve the Automation aspiration for a a carrier
- Use case Automation (Specially target new revenue Streams)
- Process automation
- CI/CD in a Telco Environment all the way from Lab,PoC,Staging,Pre-Prod and Production
- API exposure to 3rd party
Based on experience below are some key steps to achieve this goal
Steps for Real Automation
To covert targets to reality following are some real steps in sequence and in iterative manner
- Align automation tools and approaches to ETSI ZSM architecture and enhance ML/AI use cases through ENI (Enhanced Network Intelligence frameworks)
- Every real Telco is a brownfield so integration with existing OSS/BSS is a key
- Business process must be automated e.g Jira , ServiceNow, #RedHat FUse ,AMQ
- Each client need to define its standard architecture and tool framework , a level of standardization is necessary on OpenSource Tools
Project Phases to Achieve True Automation
Overall there are three phases to deliver such projects
Phase1:Warmup
Deliver the SBI I.M (Information models) including tools for automation like #Ansible and #Python etc
Phase2: Build Phase
Orchestration and Policy enforcement is necessary to bring holistic view from both #Cloud and #Networking to build E2E Automation
Phase3: Extend
Build the control loops

Saad Sheikh View All →
I am a Senior Architect with a passion to architect and deliver solutions addressing business adoption of the Cloud and Automation/Orchestration covering both Telco and IT Applications industry.
My work in carrier Digital transformation involve Architecting and deploying Platforms for both Telco and IT Applications including Clouds both Open stack and container platforms, carrier grade NFV ,SDN and Infra Networking , DevOps CI/CD , Orchestration both NFVO and E2E SO , Edge and 5G platforms for both Consumer and Enterprise business. On DevOps side i am deeply interested in TaaS platforms and journey towards unified clouds including transition strategy for successful migration to the Cloud
Please write to me on snasrullah@swedtel.com