The Emergence and Value of Next Gen AIOps for Telcos

This sponsored thought leadership article was authored by Chris Menier, General Manager – VIA AIOPS for Vitria Technology

Telecommunications, a technology intensive business, generates revenue by providing service to a diverse population of consumers. Their success depends on a quite simple formula  – grow the business by offering more connections with exceptional service at the lowest price point. While the formula is simple, consistent delivery of exceptional service is challenging.

Consumers rely on telco services for just about everything. It serves as a lifeline for healthcare providing telehealth to communicate with the chronically ill; it is the primary enabler of home schoolers accessing curriculum and collaborating with teachers and other students not enrolled in traditional school. The primary role of telco services, providing entertainment and connecting families and friends, is critical to the quality of life. Telcos enable small businesses to look big and enable big businesses to stay connected with suppliers and customers alike.

Consumers are also diverse in age, gender, education, ethnicity, and socio-economic backgrounds – but they all have one thing in common. Simply stated – they expect the service to be always on.

Telcos are obsessed with service quality. Like all businesses they have a mandate to grow. Bundling is a consistent growth strategy because the bundles, or multi-play packages, reduce churn and maximize customer lifetime value. Consumers are open to bundling because they often represent cost savings for services they use in their everyday life. Bundling of the right mix of services  increases the number of customers – more customers equal more revenue. What can go wrong?  

In a word – it is churn. Churn is the percentage of customers that cancel service within a given period. Churn, or attrition, occurs when customers stop using services. Telcos are equipped to determine churn rates and develop customer retention plans to correct churn. Pricing and promotion are consistently used to improve retention.  Another way to increase retention, or reduce churn, is consistent delivery of  exceptional service – to be always on.

Is 100% uptime or availability realistic? Maybe not, but what is realistic is the ability to proactively identify faults, correct them and restore service even before the consumer is aware of a problem. Having equal impact is the ability to identify the root cause of a service degrading fault to quickly respond and repair. Consumers rate their service experience on the speed of response described as the ability of the service provider to find the fault and fix it – restore the service.

AIOps, or the ability to use analytics to improve operations, is changing the way telcos are servicing consumers. AIOps enables automation and automation improves the speed and quality of response. Automation can replace some human capabilities with machine capabilities and machine capabilities are less prone to human error. In addition, AIOps can provide an unobstructed view of all the layers of the service delivery infrastructure. This means AIOps eliminates the minutes wasted when multiple engineers try to fix a problem that is not impacting service.  AIOps, at its best, can automate  response to service impacting issues often before the consumer is aware there is a problem. It is required to fulfill the promise of always on.

Effective AIOps saves time. AIOps telescopes into the layers of the service delivery infrastructure then focuses the right resources on the fault degrading service. This decreases time to repair. Faults are discovered and repaired often before the consumer realizes there was a problem.

AIOps improves availability and performance of infrastructure most likely to impact the consumers’ perception of service. The ability to apply AI and ML to quickly rationalize and respond to the increasing volume of event data generated by layers of the delivery platforms is not new. While AIOps has delivered marginal improvement, the ability to rely on AIOps for the intended automation eludes most organizations. Until now.

A new generation of AIOps is emerging and providing an effective solution for automating problem resolution – even preventing problems that degrade or interrupt service. Operations experts agree that there is no future for IT operations that doesn’t include the introduction of a modern, second generation AIOps for reliable automation. The telco industry has started  to deploy second generation AIOps and are beginning to see results. Second generation AIOps offers the ability to ingest, index and normalize events or telemetry from multiple domains, tools or sources including infrastructure, networks, applications, the cloud, and the feed from existing monitoring tools for cross-domain analysis.

Leveling up to always on service demands automation that is trusted by operations. The ability to trust the automation requires the AIOps solution to explain the automated action. Reliable and trusted automation requires full scope visibility across management silos – one consolidated view of the service layers used to identify the root cause that triggers the automation. Next generation AIOps enables reliable automation – the missing link for achieving service that is always on.    

Interested in learning more? Reach out to Dan Schneider at dschneider@Vitria.com

(612) 802-0155.

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