Our Blue Planet team recently had the opportunity to speak with Manish Mangal, Global CTO for Network Services at Tech Mahindra, a Blue Orbit partner and a leading provider of digital transformation, consulting and business re-engineering services and solutions. We discussed the Network as a Service (NaaS) framework, the role of automation in 5G, and how system integrators are adapting to meet the needs of CSPs globally.

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) around the world are transforming into Digital Service Providers (DSPs), which is all about becoming more customer-centric and agile by leveraging the latest cloud technologies. DSPs can now deliver on-demand services like SD-WAN and Bandwidth-on-Demand that are dynamic and responsive. What’s more, technologies like 5G and Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) are expected to drive more demand for these types of services. It’s an exciting time that will open up whole new cloud-like experience for customers and new use cases and revenue opportunities for DSPs.

In this first video, we discuss how this transformation impacts every aspect of building and operating networks; the infrastructure is going cloud-native, operations are becoming highly automated, and workloads are moving from core network to the access network to be closer to the end customer.

Network-as-a-Service, or NaaS, is a concept that has been around for a long time, but only recently have we seen technology changes necessary to make it possible. The network is no longer just about connectivity, but it is becoming a platform that CSPs can offer as-a-service, and thus enables an ecosystem of developers to build applications on it and accelerate digital transformation for enterprises.

In this next video, we discuss the real-world applications and business benefits that can be achieved through a NaaS approach, as well as the key changes in network and IT architecture that are necessary.

A discussion about network and service transformation today would not be complete without taking about 5G. In the next video, we discuss how automation has become an underlying design principle in 5G networks, across the whole network lifecycle: plan, design, build, and operate. Manish talks about Tech Mahindra’s solutions that enable this end-to-end automation.

Finally, in an industry where so much transformation is happening simultaneously, system integrators and software vendors need to adapt to meet the needs of CSPs. For system integrators, the legacy methods of stitching together various OEM platforms to create solutions cannot keep up with the pace of change. In this last video, we discuss Tech Mahindra’s transformation to become a Continuous Integrator (CI).