While customized legacy OSS solutions are tightly integrated with network service offers, the Blue Planet Cloud Native Platform uniquely decouples the OSS from the network. This abstraction allows the platform to provide a shared user interface and a path towards a common data model across inventory, orchestration, and assurance. This is a step change versus the legacy approach of offering OSS applications as completely separate products that require extensive customization and integration.
Many of our customers start by deploying just one Blue Planet application, like inventory or orchestration. This is possible because we’ve designed all our K8s-based applications to be independently deployable in any environment. But our platform now allows you to deploy additional applications more quickly and efficiently because they’re pre-integrated, reducing the hefty integration tax that often comes with a best-of-breed approach while allowing you to evolve your OSS at the pace that makes the most sense for your business. And the fact that the platform is open and standards-based means it supports any service or vendor.
The shared user interface and common data model also maximizes the ROI on the time and money you’ve already invested by reusing work on inventory management to optimize service orchestration, for example. This allows you to improve operational efficiency and reduce your cloud footprint because you’re not replicating data and functions.
Every CSP has a strategy for shifting OSS and BSS workloads to the public cloud. Indeed, telcos’ BSS transformation is largely complete, but modernizing OSS has been harder because of the tight coupling with the network. But even so, more than 80% of our OSS applications are deployed by our customers today in public clouds.
The Blue Planet Cloud Native platform is unique because it is ‘multicloud-native,’ a term coined for us by the analysts at Appledore Research – meaning the use of K8s and open APIs northbound and southbound allow it to run in any public or private cloud. So, it doesn’t matter to us whether you’re an AWS, Google, Microsoft, or private cloud shop – or even ‘all of the above’.
K8s has become the standard for deploying and managing cloud-native software in the telecoms industry due to operators’ need for more elasticity, scalability, and efficiency in deploying their OSS apps in the cloud and managing their cloud-based network functions and services.
In theory, simply using K8s should make OSS applications plug-and-play in different cloud environments. But Blue Planet has gone further – we have made significant investments in integrating our OSS applications and providing related cloud-native operations services to further streamline the transition to the cloud. Many of our competitors have not.
"The Blue Planet Cloud Native Platform transcends the traditional approach of custom ‘spaghetti integrations’ that have shackled CSPs’ ability to be adaptable, open and agile. We are pioneering a new level of convergence that embraces the cloud and transforms the OSS to be a competitive differentiator, reducing operational costs and allowing for rapid creation of new business models.”
- Joe Cumello, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Blue Planet
We don’t talk enough about the organizational and cultural changes required to transition to modern, cloud-native OSS. But this is where a shift in mindset becomes especially important.
The Blue Planet Cloud Native Platform helps CSPs embrace a DevOps model of continuous integration, delivery, and testing (CI/CD), enabling in-service software upgrades (ISSU). These are completely new ways of working for CSPs, both internally and when collaborating with their vendor partners.