AI presents a massive opportunity. Is your OSS ready?

Demand for AI connectivity surges

The rapid rise of AI presents a unique opportunity for CSPs to simultaneously increase revenue and cut costs. According to a recent survey from Ciena of more than 1,300 data center decision makers, 43% of new data center facilities are expected to be dedicated to AI workloads (see Figure 1). One of the latest examples of this is Meta’s announcement to build their largest data center to date, approximately 4 million square feet, focused on AI workloads. This rise in data centers presents a significant opportunity for communications service providers due to the growing need to interconnect them. Notably, 67% of survey respondents said that they plan to use managed optical fiber network (MOFN) services run by CSPs to interconnect distributed data centers.

Figure 1. Research commissioned by Ciena of over 1,300 data center decision makers across 13 countries.

At the same time, CSPs are beginning to use AI across their businesses to automate processes and reduce operating costs. In the telco world, this is known as “AI for network,” and it’s how operators will implement agentic AI to reach Level 4 autonomous networks. A recent study done by STL partners predicts that an average telco can save the equivalent of 5% of its revenue (US$816 million) annually by deploying AI, analytics, and automation (A3) in its network and OSS processes.

The rapid rise of AI presents a unique opportunity for CSPs to simultaneously cut costs and increase revenue. But their legacy OSS – the critical service lifecycle and operations systems that connect the front-end of their businesses to their networks – are a huge obstacle to realizing AI’s benefits.

To profit from AI, the modernization of OSS is a must

Legacy OSS systems that were designed for an era when services were static rather than dynamic now fall far short in supporting the demanding real-time workloads of AI. The existing OSS environment cannot provide an accurate, end-to-end view of the data associated with network and service resources because it is spread across disparate systems and databases, requiring cumbersome and costly integrations.

At Blue Planet, we understand the requirements of AI-driven operations, so we think about OSS differently. We understand that AI models and applications depend on being able to access high-quality data across multiple domains, in near real-time. Through our dynamic collection of data and our common data fabric, we are uniquely positioned to enable the operational visibility and insights CSPs need as they build out their agentic AI strategies. Our innovative solution approach is different in three key ways (see Figure 2). Let’s dive into each one.

Figure 2. Blue Planet combines the power of a cloud-native platform with openness and flexibility to deliver productized and proven innovation.

Cloud Native Platform

The Blue Planet Intelligent Automation Portfolio is built on the industry’s first Kubernetes-based, cloud-native platform, which can be hosted on public or private clouds. Our modular architecture lets you deploy Blue Planet applications on top of this platform at your own pace and scale, depending on your business needs.

Since the platform supports a common data model, user interfaces, resource adapters, and processes do not need to be duplicated. That means you can realize value much faster. The shared data model provides a ‘single source of truth’ for inventory and lets you directly connect planning, fulfillment, and assurance to drive closed-loop automation across all areas. This foundation is critical to developing an agentic AI framework.

Open, AI-driven architecture

Blue Planet’s platform and applications were built from the ground up on an open and standards-based architecture to reduce the complexity inherent in CSPs’ vast heterogeneous operating environments. Our AI capabilities are driven through the Blue Planet AI Studio, an open and extensible software environment that acts as an intelligent workbench for implementing and managing AI models.

AI Studio can be integrated into any of Blue Planet’s applications and workflows, and we provide a variety of pre-built AIOps use cases ready to use out of the box. But more importantly, we also provide a “Bring Your Own AI” capability that lets you execute and maintain AI models developed by your own data scientists or third-party Large Language Models (LLMs).

We enable this by providing the critical data abstraction layer needed to evolve toward a highly autonomous network. This gives Blue Planet customers a distinct advantage in realizing a modern OSS built for the AI era, enabling them to evolve to what the TM Forum defines as Level 4 autonomous networks - when we shift from traditional human-defined process automation to truly autonomous decision making by AI systems.

Productized innovation

Finally, Blue Planet’s commitment to continuous innovation is reflected in our investment in modular product code rather than expensive customizations. Our software-centric approach puts you in control, providing a user-friendly experience and minimizing the need for constant change requests and extensive professional services from a single supplier.

By adopting a productized approach to OSS, we ensure that valuable learnings from deployments with all our customers are integrated back into our products, rather than remaining as costly and complex one-off custom implementations.

Results to prove it

Blue Planet’s customer successes prove that our innovative approach to doing OSS differently works! For example, one of our customers, a leading cable operator, was able to move the service assurance of 400,000 network and IT devices from a legacy assurance solution to Blue Planet’s AI-driven assurance solution within just 4 months! And a major wholesale service provider was able to cut their high-speed circuit design time from over a month to less than 24 hours, and provisioning time from 2 weeks to less than a day!

As the agentic AI era nears, CSPs will have unprecedented opportunities to increase automation and tap new sources of revenue. Find out how Blue Planet can help you realize the full potential of AI-driven operations at FutureNet World London via Kailem Anderson’s keynote: You can’t AI what you can’t see: Illuminating the path to a Level 4 autonomous network.