Working with Amdocs, this leading North American media and communications service provider successfully brought commercial SD-WAN services into production in under seven months, enabling both greater scale and increased cost efficiencies. They are now able to offer multi-site mid-market and enterprise customers a powerful and scalable, yet cost-effective alternative to MPLS.
Content Summary
Business drivers
Enterprise SD-WAN services
Challenges
Solution
Business benefits
Business drivers
One of the company’s key business objectives is to achieve B2B market leadership by acquiring the ability to rapidly deploy dynamic, secure and lower-cost business services. A critical pillar of this strategy is software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) – an automated, programmable and integrated service comprising a layer 3 virtual private network (VPN) integrated with internet access as well as security, quality of service and traffic steering services.
This operator has three major commercial goals for their SD-WAN services:
- Compete against operators delivering business services on dedicated yet expensive IP/MPLS VPNs
- Benefit from the inherent advantages of SD-WAN: time to market, scalability, guaranteed quality of service and reduced costs
- Deliver a business services customer experience that surpasses customer expectations
Enterprise SD-WAN services
The enterprise SD-WAN offering combines dynamic, secure IP-VPN, application-aware routing and a stateful network firewall. The software-defined service provides the option to load balance and as appropriate to route a service over the public internet via a carrier-class IP-backbone instead of IP/MPLS, leveraging existing broadband and fiber-based connectivity solutions.
The SD-WAN platform enables business customers to augment or replace their existing network with an alternative that provides increased bandwidth, reliability and flexibility for better cost per mbps economics. With secure direct Internet access at the branch, connectivity and performance to the cloud and SaaS applications are improved. Enterprise-class SD-WAN accelerates performance across the entire enterprise WAN and minimizes the need and cost of backhauling traffic through centralized points of access such as corporate data centers.
SD-WAN solution bundled with virtual Firewall and other add-on services such as unified threat management, WAN optimization and virtual routing functions, orchestrated by Amdocs NFV orchestration and fully integrated with BSS/OSS from sales to cash
Challenges
Legacy IP/MPLS WAN technology is expensive and outstripped by demand for bandwidth. Competing in the rapidly evolving and highly-competitive business market, it was critical for this operator to gain the ability to introduce the new service within a very tight timeframe.
To deliver the experience that enterprise customers expect, the company also needed full service visibility and control as well as simplified management of services and resources, so they could capture all the Opex benefits of SD-WAN, such as avoiding truck rolls, but without sacrificing security.
In addition, service providers are looking for ways to increase customer’s stickiness and to elevate themselves higher in their enterprise customers’ value chain by adding / bundling value-added services (VAS) on top of connectivity.
Solution
Amdocs is the chosen partner to support this operator’s NFV journey, starting with SD-WAN and leveraging our extensive experience. Combined with our leading NFV portfolio we bring agility through orchestration, fulfillment and automation capabilities. The portfolio integrates existing business and operations support systems, as well as a wide array of virtualized service functions from a vibrant partner ecosystem.
SD-WAN solution architecture
Highlights of the pre-integrated solution, which incorporates components from Amdocs’ NFV ecosystem partners, include:
- End-to-end orchestration to support next generation network services
- Automated VNF onboarding and service design for rapid innovation
- Catalog-based, model-driven processes to minimize time to market
- NFV Orchestration for instantiation, activation and verification
- Automated fulfillment of underlay connectivity with new overlay services
- End-to-end assurance provided by TEOCO, verifying that the customer SLA’s are met and the real-time status of the services is visible to the customer
- Integration with Versa’s secure SD-WAN, Fortinet’s security VNFs including NextGen FortiGate Firewall, and TEOCO’s active service monitoring for service assurance functions
- Active and available inventory for a unified, live view of services and network
- Integration with the existing OSS stack
Implementation of Amdocs’ NFV portfolio represents the first step in the journey towards offering virtual services to any tier of business customers, including enterprise, mid-market and SMB. Primary use cases for the modeldriven, IP-VPN-based overlay service include service fulfilment, service bandwidth modification and service termination.
Amdocs NFV orchestration supports current and future virtual network functions and services, such as managed routers and security services. It will also form a key part of joint development of a network automation platform which is designed to rapidly deploy, orchestrate and automate business services.
Business benefits
Scalability: Amdocs’ automation and simplification of the delivery process supports growth in volume and complexity of business orders. The volume of orders is expected to rise to more than 3,000 per month without the need for a corresponding increase in human resources.
Efficiency: Automation has delivered a 65% reduction in the end-to-end process, reducing both costs and time to market.
Agility: The agile and dynamic development process with Amdocs resulted in a seven-month time to market from design/inception to production, enabling the operator to bring the new SD-WAN service to market very quickly – on time and within budget.
Vendor-agnostic: Amdocs’ multi-domain, multi-vendor orchestration platform is open to any VNF from any vendor, avoiding vendor lock-in for both themselves and their customers. VNFs can be deployed at the customer premises, the data center or on the public cloud, as required by the customer.
Future readiness: Amdocs’ solution will support the operator’s ongoing virtualization and modernization plans. As their NFV journey vision unfolds, Amdocs NFV orchestration provides a platform that can support
new virtual services to any tier of business (services like virtual firewalls, UTM and many more) without the need for manual effort to integrate with the BSS layer or with previous NFV use cases.
This media & communications service provider now has a next generation network services platform in place that accelerates service fulfilment today, thereby enhancing their competitiveness in the business market, as well as ensuring they will be ready for the new virtual services of the future.
Source: Amdocs Open Network
