The document presents research on service automation, providing insight into the industry’s transition towards a fully automated and service delivery system.
This shift is driven by standardised business APIs with high fidelity, interoperability, and extensibility that allow service providers to scale efficiently with many partners and services, without the need for repeated investment.
“Increasingly next-generation services like Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solutions will be delivered across an ecosystem of many providers, from retail and wholesale service providers, to hyperscalers, to technology solution providers, and so on, and the networks supporting these services will be fully API-driven,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF.
“For this to happen, standards-based automation is required throughout the entire supply chain where all parties adopt a common, standardised set of APIs at both the business process and operational levels.”
Areas identified as where automation can provide significant benefits including customer service, billing and settlement, and supply chain management.
Key findings show that service providers using standardised business APIs can reduce their order cycle times by 25%; they can speed up time to revenue for each MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) API-enabled order; boost revenue opportunities by becoming a preferred partner; and implement multiple LSO APIs in roughly 3-5 months with the help of LSO solution providers.
“Enterprise requirements for cloud-like experiences are driving industry transformation to secure dynamic services across a global ecosystem of automated networks. Secure NaaS platforms, for example, are particularly reflective of this trend as they combine on-demand connectivity, application assurance, cybersecurity, and multi-cloud-based services,” said Stan Hubbard, principal analyst, MEF.
“MEF research reveals that over 122 service providers worldwide are now in some stage of the LSO adoption lifecycle. With LSO Sonata APIs service providers can transition from manual processes and isolated islands of customized APIs to an open, interoperable standards model that enables plug-and-play reuse of APIs with any partner and service with minimal additional cost and effort.”
