Category: Insights

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IT Agility

Achieve security objectives at speed with automated vulnerability management

Reduce time taken to fix security vulnerabilities by 50% with vulnerability analysis best practices

Cyber-attacks are increasing every day and are now the third-highest global risk, according to the World Economic Forum. GSMA’s mobile telecommunications security threat landscape report of 2019 says, “there was a 55% increase in breaches caused by open-source software vulnerabilities”.

Addressing security vulnerabilities is a top priority for service providers in the connectedness industry because a cyber-attack could disrupt services for millions of customers, impact customer’s trust, and deteriorate service provider’s brand & reputation. To achieve the required security objectives, service providers must adopt a structured approach to vulnerability management. Vulnerability management, which is the process of finding, assessing, remediating, and mitigating security weaknesses for known assets, gives service providers the ability to assess the status and risk of unknown hardware/software.

Depending on the service provider’s infrastructure size and state of the configuration management database (CMDB), finding the responsible asset owner can be a highly challenging and cumbersome task, resulting in lead times of up to many weeks. Therefore, vulnerability management must include automation to discover new vulnerabilities, perform risk assessment, and assign it to the right team for a quick resolution.


Addressing security vulnerabilities with speed is a top priority for service providers as a successful cyber-attack can essentially disrupt service for millions of customers

Fig:  Steps followed in field service operation showcasing the importance of spare information

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Accelerate SD-WAN service delivery to serve the pent-up demand for the enterprise connectivity

Automate and digitize workflows to achieve touchless SD-WAN configuration, provisioning, and activation

Before the pandemic, SD-WAN was primarily marketed to enterprises to reduce costs and improve flexibility. As businesses realized the pressure to go digital, cloud applications became the foundation for most organizations, enhancing their productivity and collaboration. What eventually evolved into an absolute necessity was to run these essential applications more efficiently, on a more reliable network -which is why SDWAN has become one of the most successful networking functions in decades. What will further fuel this adoption is the recent shift to a mostly remote or hybrid workforce model. According to a report by IDG Research Services and Masergy, over 90% of organizations expect to adopt an SDWAN solution eventually.

For businesses, Managed SDWAN Services provide attractive opportunities to tap into the growing SDWAN market and create new revenue streams. As per Markets and Markets Research, the global SD-WAN market size is expected to grow from USD 1.9 billion in 2020 to USD 8.4 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 34.5% during the forecast period.

But businesses can seize this opportunity only if they fulfill their customer needs on
time – by quickly activating the SD-WAN services. Potential roadblocks such as validating network compatibility, managing the service across multiple platforms, and solving the integration, operational and process-centric challenges can significantly delay the order to activate journey – leading to revenue loss and missed opportunities.


To accelerate the entire Order-to-Activate journey, businesses must eliminate process inefficiencies and embrace automation and digitalization at various levels.

To accelerate the entire order to activate journey, businesses must eliminate process inefficiencies and embrace automation and digitalization at various levels. This also means building a holistic tool that enables consolidating and automating workflows to achieve touchless SDWAN configuration, provisioning, and activation.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Breaking down the barriers to scale RPA across the enterprise

Proven methodologies to create a steady pipeline of processes to be automated

Service providers across the globe are at various stages in their journey to embrace robotic process automation (RPA) to increase their operational efficiency. But scaling RPA and making it an organization-wide success is a big challenge. As per Deloitte’s Global Robotics Report 2018, over 80% of organizations implementing RPA were happy with the results, but only 1% of them could scale considerably in the past 1 year (50+ bots in a year).

The inability to identify appropriate use cases after initial implementations are the major bottleneck for service providers. The lack of end-to-end visibility of the process by the siloed business units further adds to this plight.

Service providers must explore various methodologies to create a steady process pipeline that can be automated. These techniques are – comprehensive analysis, design thinking workshop, and process mining.

Figure 1: RPA Demand Generation Methodologies

Download the Insight to learn about the techniques in detail and learn how to choose the correct method as per your organization’s maturity stage.


As per Deloitte, 80% of organizations implementing RPA were happy with the results, but only 1% of them were able to scale considerably in the next 1 year

Categories
Digital Customer Experience

Simplify e-commerce selling

Gain wins by successfully recreating the offline buying experiences online

Understanding your customers needs and preferences has become increasingly crucial to winning in the digital economy. Digital commerce excels at providing choices to the long tail of users. Yet this very strength can result in a lack of intuitiveness for customers.

The promise of friction free commerce is a receding horizon. One reason is that the websites and user interfaces fail to comprehend their customers, leaving them confused and disappointed. As a result, the customer ends up switching to offline stores, which impacts the business’s potential to monetize their eCommerce platform.


The success of the digital economy increasingly depends on knowing your customers’ needs and preferences.

As an enterprise, you need to uncover innovative ways to transform your e-commerce platform. Adopt disruptive solutions that will revolutionize your e-commerce space by encouraging more customers to go online. Focus on these four key areas to re-imagine your e-commerce platform:

  • Perform competitor, product and customer analysis to benchmark ideas and bring in best practices
  • Visualize how users behave and interact across the web pages to improve user engagement
  • Use features (e.g., flagging), tools, and systems to swiftly deliver new products and offerings to customers
  • Build SEO engine to improve site performance
Categories
Salesforce

CRM and the holy grail of personalization

Leverage Salesforce Communications Cloud to increase efficiency of care agents, while reducing overall TCO by 15%

The leading telecom, entertainment and technology companies in the world are opting for new innovative levels of customer care to keep up with the evolving customer preferences. One effective way to improve customer care is by turning to personalization to differentiate the offerings. Businesses can unlock new streams of revenue by bundling existing products or services (or unbundling to offer ‘singles’) based on the customer’s needs.

The legacy customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure often restricts the company’s operations. Some of the main challenges faced by the customer care agents due to legacy CRM systems are:

  • The data must be sourced from several different applications, resulting in varied data formats
  • The absence of technology-specific API integrations for billing, invoicing, etc., restricts the order management flow
  • Frequent manual intervention kills efficiency, thanks to errors and slow resolution of customer issues
  • No scope for providing a personalized experience due to lack of insights on customer’s buying habits

CRM


Salesforce is an extremely powerful platform right out of the box. But to reap maximum benefits, enterprises must focus on the right set of transformation levers.

One powerful approach to delivering a relevant customer experience is modernizing the existing CRM with Salesforce Communications Cloud. The Salesforce platform provides loads of capabilities such as order orchestration, automation of case assignments, and hyper-personalized experience to customers.

The platform is extremely powerful, right out of the box. But to reap the maximum benefits, enterprises must focus on the right set of transformation levers. This includes using Salesforce’s low-code platform capabilities, applying the Process Builder automation tool to automate case assignment, and customizing the TMF endpoints to provide a personalized touch. With the help of these levers, enterprises can effectively connect all the dots for integrating customer data, personalizing customer interactions, and transforming digital experiences.

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IT Agility

Site reliability engineering for the connected world: Revolutionize your IT Ops

Modern business cannot afford the conflict between the urgent need to manage a dynamic situation and the strategic need to build for the future.

In today’s new-age markets, every major business is tech driven and, data is its backbone. Its IT success depends on its ability to develop, test, and deploy features (or products if you’re a pure tech player) at scale and at a faster rate than competitors. The speed at which changes roll out should match customer expectations, else you risk irrelevance.

For example, a business rolling out new products must contend with the constant tussle between the development side, which writes software, and those who run it. DevOps principles seem to alleviate the situation, as they spell out a way to harmonize the two silos. Perhaps your company has crossed this bridge.

But this perfect picture may not match your reality. Incidents and downtime may undermine the DevOps effort, forcing resources to manage them. A meltdown of IT Operations (ITOps) can bring development to a dramatic halt; or many small ones can bleed your operations to a state of stagnation.

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SRE effectively ends the age-old battle between development and operations.

The answer is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, which is a prescriptive way of implementing DevOps. SRE creates a playbook that streamlines ITOps and shields people from critical situations, while those are being handled.

Development teams can focus on feature development instead of achieving and maintaining service levels in the form of incidents and uptimes, thereby improving the reliability of the business-critical operation.

Categories
Cloud

Breaking the barrier between Machine Learning (ML) prototype and production

Leverage MLOps to scale and realize the ML use cases faster

Most businesses in the ‘Connectedness’ industry have started embracing Machine Learning (ML) technology to provide effective customer service to the customers. However, managing these ML projects and putting them into action is challenging. For service providers who strive to move beyond ideation and embed ML into their business processes, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) will be a game-changer. According to Gartner, “Launching ML pilots is deceptively easy but deploying them into production is notoriously challenging”. Listed below are a few challenges that make it hard to scale ML initiatives.

  • Lack of automated mechanism to address the change request in ML pipeline
  • Inefficient ways of retraining and deploying the ML models to accommodate the data changes
  • Lack of in-depth visibility of the model’s performance

Service providers need to implement the MLOps approach to overcome these challenges, which automates and monitors the entire machine learning life cycle. It enables consistent improvement in the baseline accuracy and accelerates the production time of ML models.


Launching ML pilots is deceptively easy but deploying them into production is notoriously challenging.

The successful implementation of the MLOps approach requires the right set of enablers such as de-coupled architecture, standard change management process, automated retraining and deployment of ML models, and continuous monitoring.

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Move Broadband rollout to the fast lane, with enhanced quality

Leverage Unified Automation Testing Framework that integrates various tools and systems to fuel quick and error-free product releases

While the need for speed is a famous mantra across industries, businesses in the connectedness vertical often struggle with longer roll-out times owing to evolving network technologies and frequent Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) upgrades. To generate new revenue streams, service providers need to accelerate their Broadband Residential Gateway Rollout (routers, modems, switches etc.) and at the same time keep their capital expenditures minimal.

Traditional testing methods with multiple testing tools and automation frameworks are often unable to meet the desired roll-out timelines, causing complexities and dependency on experts. Moreover, service providers also experience the perennial challenge of repetitive testing to cover all scenarios and features, which is tedious and might lead to human errors.

Service providers, today, must look beyond manual, monotonous, and vendor-dependent testing methods. Adopt a Unified Automation Testing Framework to enhance your testing methodology by seamlessly integrating multiple test tools and frameworks. This framework can:

  • Auto-learn the device configuration
  • Provide a customizable solution to accelerate the development time
  • Seamlessly integrate with the service provider’s test environments, test tools, and management systems for smooth execution of all test cases


While the need for speed is a famous mantra across industries, businesses in the connectedness vertical often struggle with longer rollout times owing to evolving network technologies and frequent Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) upgrades.

By implementing this framework, service providers can proactively solve broadband performance issues, improve customer experience, and accelerate the Broadband Residential Gateway Rollout Time.

Categories
Digital Customer Experience

Experience can make a huge difference – Get it right

Mastering the implementation of digital capabilities is the key to overcome experience disconnect

Would customers pay more for the delightful and seamless experience their favorite brand offers? In the coming years, most of them certainly will. Research shows that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great experience. Experience has become a key brand differentiator, overtaking the price and product. Yet, many organizations may not grab this opportunity completely – as their customers may experience disconnect in the digital world.

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Getting the experience right requires implementing the right digital capabilities that consistently delight customers in every interaction.

The perception of a brand is built upon accumulated consistent interactions across multiple digital touchpoints. Getting the experience right requires an organization to implement the right digital capabilities that consistently delight their customers in every interaction. But as a matter of fact, most digital initiatives fail to reach their stated goals. One major reason is the gap between strategy formulation and strategy implementation. Incorrect implementation choices taken at the beginning of the project can make the organization rigid and unadaptable to deliver a seamless experience.

What can businesses do to make first-time right digital implementation choices? Critically evaluate the maturity of existing digital capabilities and plan the transition steps more methodically. Before starting the digital implementation journey, businesses must get the right answers to “Where to start?”, “How to start?”, and “How to get a head start?”.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Fiber is fast, but rollout needs to keep up

AI/ML can forecast delays before they occur, making the service delivery predictable and fast

The global pandemic has highlighted the fact that high-speed broadband is a necessity, not a luxury. And fiber is one of the ways to faster broadband. This appetite for fiber means that service providers need to roll out fiber-based connectivity services faster. However, with the rising complexities in the order management process, delivering the service within the specified timeline is becoming a nightmare. The main business issue is unpredictability, which may be as important as speed. Its absence means frustration for service providers and their customers.

The main cause of this lack of predictability stems from the structure of the process. In many cases, the enterprise service delivery process has evolved and grown organically. The most common causes of dysfunction are:

  • Multiple teams operating in silos prevent a clear view of the process and a single source of truth
  • Manual hand-offs leading to errors and delays
  • Dependency on external vendors, resulting in vendors operational issues being transferred to the service provider
  • Lack of strategies to forecast order delays
  • Lack of mechanisms for real-time tracking of service delivery flow

To overcome these challenges and tap into the next wave of opportunities, service delivery operations will require an advanced vision. AI/ML is at the heart of that vision. With AI/ML in service delivery, enterprises can predict and address delays before they impact the business. Enterprise AI can, over time, improve the prediction of potential delays and delivery dates at all points of the order journey. Over time, enterprises can achieve faster processing of orders with improved predictions.

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The appetite for high-speed broadband demands a faster rollout of fiber-based connectivity services.