MEF18 - Kevin Sheehan, Ciena - Network Automation: Lessons We Have Learned During the Past 3 Years

MEF18, 29 Oct - 2 Nov - Kevin Sheehan, CTO of the Americas, Ciena, shares lessons learned over the past three years related to the important topic of network automation. Kevin scores industry progress against 3 key trends that he predicted in 2015 that would not change in coming years: (1) the need to do more with less, (2) the need for speed, and (3) the need for seamless connectivity. He also covers several additional recent industry trends and lessons learned, including (1) open source & open architecture, (2) the embrace of hyper-scale development, (3) leveraging analytics for adaptive behavior, and (4) bandwidth inversion across networks.

Need to do More for Less
NFV breaks the more for less rule. "NFV - the beginning of the journey - is really more for more...You do have this investment in the beginning - more, right, you spend more in the beginning - but at the end you have a much more powerful platform, a much more flexible platform to deploy your services off of."

Need for Speed
"There's much more competition in the market today for service providers. What happens - and what our service provider partners tell me about almost on a daily basis - is if they're not able to close a new opportunity with a business customer quickly, there's a significant opportunity to lose that business to the competition. As a result, service providers are looking more and more to automate the process of provisioning of new services."

"The ability to provision services much more quickly allows the service provider to pull in revenue that was on the near term horizon - pull it in to today, or tomorrow, or next week instead. So that revenue accelerating is actually the biggest lever in the business case."

Need for Seamless Connectivity
Seamless connectivity drives the need for automation across multiple carriers and cloud providers, and MEF18 PoCs illustrate progress on this front. "Some domains yield a lot faster fruit in terms of automation. Some of the first things we automated were wavelength services...but what we've learned over the last three years is when you're automating services like Ethernet services you can actually get much quicker returns on the service because Ethernet by nature is over-provisioned. You have a lot more bandwidth available typically in an Ethernet, MPLS, IP network, so when you go out an automate instant turn-up of the new service the network is there for you to tap into the service."

Open Source & Open Architecture
Open source is a workforce multiple, but it also is valuable for a service provider to work closely with their vendor within an open architecture environment.

Embrace Hyper-Scale Development
Service providers will be better off by being a part of the hyper-scale journey.

Leveraging Analytics for Adaptive Behavior
Closed-loop analytics enables proactive, intelligent avoidance of problems.

Bandwidth Inversion Across the Network
"Nothing is the same - even in the last three years. What we have seen...like 5 years ago, we were selling much more bandwidth into the core of networks. And you were consuming a lot more bandwidth into the core of networks. And in the last few years, it's kind of all at the edge. The edge is getting much smarter. The edge, the metro is getting a tone more bandwidth."

Download presentation: https://mef.box.com/s/uf0dp91tk52bfcwuzieuwd98tdrykxv7

Save the date for MEF19, 18-22 November 2019, JW Marriott, LA LIVE, Los Angeles.