- Telcos want to use agentic AI for their OSS systems, but they acknowledge the problem of having a lot of silos
- Ciena’s Blue Planet has created an agentic AI framework to solve this problem
- Lumen Technologies is one of the first service providers to implement this agentic AI framework
Telco operation support systems (OSS) are ripe for agentic AI deployments. There's just one problem: operators don't want to be stuck deploying a different agent for each of the siloes they've built over the last 30 years.
Enter Ciena. The vendor's Blue Planet division will be at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World (DTW) event in Copenhagen this week, touting its agentic AI software.
Joe Cumello, SVP and general manager of Blue Planet, said the company has been engaging with customers over the last several months to understand their long-term vision for using agentic AI within their operation support systems (OSS) and what's stopping them from executing.
Ciena CMO Rebecca Smith summed up the issue at the company’s Vectors conference last month, noting “Inventory is a very challenging thing because it is so deeply embedded into the way you operate. But unfortunately, a lot of service providers over time had deployed inventory in a very siloed nature. So, if they were going to launch a business service, they would have an inventory for that. If they were going to launch a residential service, there would be a different inventory. And then they are not based on the same data model.”
How then do telcos get out of the silo conundrum?
In answer to that, Blue Planet has created an agentic AI framework for the OSS, which layers on top of all the service types within the optical layer, the IP layer and the mobile layer.
“We’re proposing a different way of looking at the universe,” said Cumello.
Blue Planet is working with Lumen Technologies, and Cumello used Lumen as an example to explain the agentic AI framework. He said Lumen has had a lot of acquisitions over the years, culminating in 17 different inventory systems. “We’re going to absorb the information from each inventory system, and as it gets federated it will be shut off,” he said. “In the process of moving that information to Blue Planet we’re making sure it’s clean.”
Although Lumen is cleaning up its inventory silos, Cumello said different operators ask for a variety of things from Blue Planet. “Everyone starts at a different place depending on their legacy OSS,” he said.
At Swisscom, Blue Planet is helping the operator with service assurance. For Telefonica Germany, it’s helping the company clean up its inventory and also enable 5G slicing across its diaspora of vendors and inventory.
This momentum with customers is showing up in the company's financial results. Ciena CEO Gary Smith said on the company’s earnings call this month, “Blue Planet had a record performance in Q2, achieving its highest ever quarterly revenue at just under $30 million. This milestone reflects the success of our deliberate transformation efforts over the past couple of years, positioning Blue Planet to better serve our customers' digital transformation needs and journey."
Are the TM Forum's APIs really open?
At DTW this week, Gabriele Di Piazza, VP of Product Management, Alliances and Architectures for Blue Planet, will be discussing open APIs and inventory management systems on a panel entitled “Open-API Architectures: Lessons from Real-World Deployments.”
Chris Wade, the CTO of Itential, has said that he wishes OSS companies would just publish their APIs rather than keeping them secret and working on an API overlay standardization with the TM Forum. In terms of Blue Planet, Wade noted that most of its documentation appears to be behind a login for customers and partners, which is similar to other OSS vendors.
But Cumello defended Blue Planet saying, “Our philosophy has always been that maximum openness is the right answer. There is a large contingent of vendors who prefer an abstraction of what they do because it makes it harder for people to work around them. That’s never been Blue Planet’s philosophy.”
He said Blue Planet was established to be an open dev-ops-friendly platform with APIs having the ability to talk north or south bound. "All Blue Planet APIs are documented and provided to the people who need them...our Blue Planet DevOps community (partners and customers) and distributed through our portal," he said.
Despite its preference for open APIs, Blue Planet also does work with the TM Forum’s effort to create a standardized set of APIs across all the different OSS vendors. Itential works with the TM Forum as well.
From Cumello’s perspective DTW is a great show not only for the official TM Forum panels but also as a place to meet with customers. “We go because all of our customers go,” he said. “We’ll do 30-40 meetings there. For me to travel to 30-40 places around the world, it's really inefficient. I could see them all at DTW, so it's a great forum.”
Fierce Network will be live on-site at the event, so stay tuned for more from the show.