Now On Demand- Accelerating the Shift to A Differentiated Service Experience
Service providers are looking to differentiate from their competition to win new business and to combat churn. This means that they are now putting differentiated and guaranteed service levels at the center of their business models. Offering service differentiation at scale is a daunting task. This executive session will offer insights on how to leverage network automation solutions to effectively align people, processes and technology and ensure customer experience is always made a priority.
Executive Speakers:
Aamir Hussain - SVP and Chief Product Officer, Verizon Business
Brendan Gibbs - VP, Automated WAN Solutions, Juniper Networks
Neil McRae - Group Chief Architect, British Telecom
Roy Chua - Founder, AvidThink
Transcription Details
File type: Audiovisual
Time: 23:07
Transcription Results
SPEAKERS
Host, Brendan Gibbs, Aamir Hussain, Neil McRae, Roy Chua
Host:
As the introduction of 5G in the transition to multi-cloud has enabled a new generation of cloud-hosted content applications and services. Like other services, adoption and retention will be gauged by service quality, which will result in either a positive or negative customer experience. Joining this session to demonstrate the opportunity for network operators to increase the relevance and value in the delivery of network connectivity content and application services is Brendon Gibbs, he's Vice President Automated Wan Solutions at Juniper. We also have Amir Hussain; he is Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Verizon Business. We also have Neil McCray; he's group chief architect at BT. And last we have Roy Chua, he's founder of AvidThink, and gentlemen, welcome to the program. I want to start off right away. Aamir, I'll go to you first if you don't mind, let's really start sort of at a high level and setting the stage. Do you agree that communication service providers should focus on differentiating their services by delivering the best customer experience and more specifically, ensuring uninterrupted service quality? Aamir.
Aamir Hussain:
I wholeheartedly agree with this, we are in the business of providing service despite the notion of our name. We are in-network service business where exceptional customer experience is at the foundation of all that we do. Without that, it really doesn't matter how one comes in and tries to differentiate themselves. It's the service that the customers get from us that really counts. We connect customers, anchoring their backbone, their critical infrastructure and helping them innovate on their own businesses using technologies such as 5G and Mac, but we have to hold ourselves accountable to take these complex technologies, make an easy to use by our customers, so they can operate it, we can operate it on their behalf. All that is a part of our value proposition. Unparalleled service quality is a must-do with our customers, we partner with customers on a journey and that journey guarantees customer service, quality assurance, the whole learn by [unintelligible 02:16] experience needs to be fully automated. When I look at Verizon, we've earned the reputation of one of the best and reliable networks in the world, and that's just not me talking. If you look at RootMetrics, they've graded us 15 consecutive years in a row as a network that has the best quality possible, and that takes a lot of work behind the scenes. That takes us working with the customers, it takes us starting our value proposition and ending with service quality and that's what we are all about. So, again, wholeheartedly agree with this.
Neil McRae:
Apologies, sorry. Customer experience is the number one thing that we walk towards now and it's taken as expected from our customers. And also, our customers want more from us, they want more services. And actually, we want to give them more services and more capabilities. If we don't do that in a way that works well and has got great experience, they won't work with us, they'll go somewhere else. So, it's absolutely paramount.
Host:
And Brendon.
Brendan Gibbs:
One of the things I think that we've all experienced over the last year working from home with COVID is frankly, the network matters more than ever. All facets of our lives frankly, from this basic connectivity to communication with loved ones is done on the network. And that makes the importance of the network and the importance of the experience of that network paramount. So, absolutely quality of experience and service quality is top of mind for sure.
Host:
Hey, Roy, I want to go to you on this one and of course, I want to get the operator's point of view as well but I want to start off with an analyst point of view. So, many CSPs believe that automation has the power to deliver their strategic priority for ensuring the end-user experience. How do you see automation playing a role in onboarding customers really faster and delivering uninterrupted service quality? Roy.
Roy Chua:
Definitely, I would say that, as Aamir and Brandon, and Neil have talked about, service quality is important, differentiated services is important and I think fundamentally, automation is critical in doing that. There is no way without a substantial investment in automation to be able to provision customers in a timely manner. Because after you purchase a service, whatever wonderful service you have, if you can't get to it or use it in a timely manner, whatever timely means. Today, timely means within five seconds after I purchase it, I expect to be able to use it. So, without automation certainly, that's not possible. [unintelligible: 05:01] is not just the initial provisioning of the services, it's also the ongoing monitoring of those services, the close loop nature of seeing what's going on with that service, the telemetry that's gathered and taking action on that to ensure that the quality of experience that the customer expects from that service, whatever it may be, is maintained through the lifetime of that service. And I think that's one of the key things. And automation, again, without that there's just no way that the CSPs can deliver on the promise to their customers.
Host:
And Aamir, on automation.
Aamir Hussain:
Yeah, Roy is absolutely right. Without automation, you cannot guarantee the service experience. And automation doesn't have to come in after the fact, it's how the customers discover the service, how they acquire it, how they purchase it, how they use the service, and then giving them visibility on how the service is performing and then automatically fixing the issues too. What we do on behalf of our customers is fairly complex and there are all these things that don't pan out the way you plan. As long as the customer doesn't see it, as long as it happens behind the scene and it all gets fixed in an automated fashion, that will count too. Automation is key to creating the best customer experience possible and it helps us lead to a cost structure that will be passed to a customer so that we can stay competitive in our marketplace.
Neil McRae:
Yeah, [unintelligible: 06:25] the other thing I'd say is, the network is built so complex, to try and run it manually just isn't feasible anymore. We've got so many different parameters can change, so many different things to add, everything from tilt and antennas to switching channels. Anyone who's not making a significant investment in automation is really on a path to ruin. It's so crucially important, even just the basic services, we need automation to scale and grow the network today.
Host:
Hey, Brandon, I want to post the next question to you and it's an interesting question. I think. So, we all know the quote from Peter Drucker, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." One question that often comes to mind, can we accurately measure service quality delivered to customers, and do you believe we have the solutions in place to understand service quality as an end-user? Or do you think the industry really needs to improve in this area?
Brendan Gibbs:
I think the solutions are there but I absolutely think the industry needs to make a lot of steps forward. Because one of the things I'm very cognizant of is that there's a survey that was done last year of around 200 large enterprises and service providers in the United States. And that survey actually revealed that about 60% of all problems are discovered first by the end-users, not by the provider themselves. And what we found also, is that 95% of customers that have a bad service experience just walk away, they don't call to complain, they don't have a back and forth with their provider, they just leave, and that sort of churn is ruinous. I really like Neil's comment just now that providers that don't invest in and focus on automation are on a path to ruin. So, with these type of metrics, with end-users generally finding their own problems first and leaving if they had these separate problems, that really creates an imperative, a business imperative for service providers to focus on service quality but to measure it themselves. And these solutions do exist. Juniper required late last year, a company called Net rounds, that's a pioneer, a leader in this, and what we've delivered with our paragon active assurance solution is the capability to create synthetic measurements on the data plane that mimic an end-user service quality of experience, whether it's mobility, or voice or video, or other cloud-delivered applications. It's an imperative and the abilities are there. So, providers really need to take this leap themselves, and actively test and assure that service quality end to end before the end-users of their own network find it themselves.
Host:
Interesting.
Roy Chua:
Yeah, Brendan is absolutely right. I think in many cases, the solutions do exist. We know how to do this but culturally, that's not the way we think. You look at some of the application development on web applications, there is something called [unintelligible: 09:14] test methodology or test-driven development, TDD... where you start actually with the testing when you are trying to share what the experience is and you work backward from there in the development process. And I think the same thing as we're building our networks with 4G to 5G, we usually focus on let's get connectivity, let's get it up first, and then we'll worry about the rest later and I think that is a problem culturally. And so, the solutions do exist, active testing, understanding from a user standpoint, not just passive monitoring as we've always done in the past. I think those kinds of things are really important. At the same time, I think there is still work to be done in terms of developing the solutions. The applications getting more sophisticated. Brendon talked about, sort of voice and video and we have these [unintelligible: 09:56] scores, mean opinion scores from before, and the e-model and all these complex things that we've done. But as we move to gaming, what the first-person shooter experience? What's the impact, if you lose a packet, if you have high jitter, if you have more latency? What's the impact of that on higher-level applications? I think those things, certainly, I think there's still work to be done, there's still improvements be made. And also take into account this underlay overlay concept, where maybe there's a failure at the bottom of the link level, but it overlaid as protection or there's forward error correction. And so, understanding the context, the full stack of the experience, I think, is certainly an area that I think we're still actively exploring. But I think that aside, fundamentally, we just got to get the assurance mindset first and I don't think we're all there yet.
Neil McRae:
One of the key things in automation is kind of getting some model-based infrastructure so that we can model this in a way that we know that what we're measuring, is consistent across our own networks, other people's networks, and other people's applications. And I think we've made massive strides on that in the last few years, but still much more to do. And still much more that model mindset, we still see an awful lot of stuff turning up that hasn't got the models to support and we're like, whoa, hold on a second, we need this to be able to really measure what's happening in the network in a way that makes sense.
Host:
Yeah, actually, you just answered my question. So, I'm going to take this question over to Aamir and if anybody wants to respond, that's fine. So Aamir, where are you on your journey to automate your network services and how are you really ensuring that network automation is not being achieved at the expense of the customer experience?
Aamir Hussain:
Well, look, we don't see network automation as detrimental to the customer experience to the contrary, it's essentially helping complement the experience. So, we are continuously driving operational efficiencies across all aspects of our business, and in doing so, we are trying to ensure that the customer gets the best experience possible with the right accuracy, speed, and effectiveness on how they buy and consume our services. Voice of the Customer is actually a key input that helps us ensure those improvements in support are where the customers want to go, help us create differentiation and a superior experience, and ensure that our automation is driven by customer, for customer and on behalf of the customers in both pre-sales, post-sales, expanding segmentations, promotions, pricing, quoting, ordering, provisioning, installation assurance, I can go on and on. And we do that by leveraging some internal automation we have built, we have also been utilizing some key partners on AI, Ml, RPA orchestration of different platforms, it's all being done to provide an effective experience to the customers. Remember, this is not a one-time deal. When you go and sell something to the customer, you have to support them and it's got to work every time. And I would just reiterate something that Neil said, we have very, very complex technology and it's getting even more complex, but the customer experience and their desire to use the technology is getting simpler and simpler, and that two has to meet. And the only way you do it is by ensuring that you're automating the heck out of everything you do and making it simple for customer service.
Host:
So, Brendon, I know this is probably a better question for the operators, but I want to get your take on this and then maybe get a response. So, before ensuring the end-user experience, do you feel automation also has the power to transform the operational experience? And if yes, where are the gaps that you see with this current automation toolset?
Brendan Gibbs:
I really do think there's an opportunity to transform not only the experience for the end-user but also the experience for the operator themselves. I think both sides are paramount because operators need to answer a fundamental question, how do you know-how. Ho you know if your services up? Even before you introduce a service, how do you know that it will scale effectively so you don't have a trial and error at the expense of users? How do you know it's up? How do you know whether the quality is there at your expectation? And how do you know how it will perform at scale? So, I think embedding this type of active assurance, with a focus on service quality from the entirety of a design, delivery, and then ongoing operations of the services, baking that into all stages of the operational lifecycle is really critical. And it gives opportunity for operators to dramatically simplify things so that they can then focus on that quality of experience, automating the mundane, answering the questions beforehand, so you not only have assurance of the service for the end-users but assurance within your own mind as an operator. I absolutely think this is paramount.
Roy Chua:
To add to that, I think what we seen recently, I think across the board is, when we move to sort of cloud-native architectures and 5G, some of the automation, I would say, themes that have come from the hyper scalars are making their way into the cloud service provider, the carriers as well. Some from the cloud service providers to the communication service providers, so we're seeing sort of the cultural infusion. And I think that coupled with what we're seeing in terms of the need for higher resiliency and improved security, is driving a little different mindset. Before we were okay with people touching equipment directly, making one-time changes in the light. But with the complexity that we're dealing with, as Neil and Aamir talked about, the complexity of the elements in the wall, you can't do that anymore. And so, now it's sort of automation first. Automation as an obstruction layer to infrastructure change that allows us to get scalability, to drive resiliency, and also security. Having that obstruction layer protects you against direct changes in infrastructure that can be tracked, that can be monitored as appropriate. So, in terms of, scalability, resiliency, security, and the whole experience of the end-user, automation is becoming critical to that. And I think I'm seeing a cultural shift within the carriers.
Host:
Roy, actually, I'm going to stick with you on this last question and I will go around the room here. Where do you see the service provider ecosystem, let's say in the next 12 months, particularly with 5G network slicing technology that can provide users with a dedicated end-to-end network with guaranteed quality? What's your take on that, Roy?
Roy Chua:
I think the reality is within the next 12 months, I think we talked a lot about network slicing and dedicated end to end networks, and I think the reality is that we'll be launching a little bit of it, some of it, but probably in the 12-month timeframe, not necessarily all of it. So, I think that there's a step to get there. But with regard to the ecosystem, I think assurance is going to become a big part of the service provider ecosystem, assurance players [unintelligible: 17:02] solutions, I think going to be certainly part of that. And I think automation players are going to play a bigger part and the bigger role in terms of the service providers at a portfolio technology portfolio as we're rolling out these kinds of services.
Host:
And Amir?
Aamir Hussain:
The evolution of 5G network slicing will continue to evolve over a period of time, it will happen. It's starting but it's not going to be an end-all journey in 12 months. We do follow GPP implementation guidelines and I personally believe that having a broadband slice will be the first one to be implemented and followed by other slices, eventually, leading to a dynamic allocation of resources, slices for different customer use cases. We do a lot of work, for example, with our customers, where they're really digitally transforming their business. And we used to go sell services to a person who was responsible for buying Telco infrastructure, now we're selling it to folks who are managing digital applications and they want to make sure that as their applications move from on-prem to off-prem, it happens with full automation, with full resiliency and they want to be able to manage the experience that they want to provide internally to their own customer base. So, having a broadband slice for time-sensitive applications is an [unintelligible: 18:26] of our value proposition and I think there'll be premium broadband experiences that will be created on top of that. Our position is that we will continue to support what we have for our customers, which is quality of service, and then on top of that, you'll have several slices available to the masses, where we can have a slice for a specific use case or slice for broadband that we can provide to our customers both internally and externally. And that'll allow them to manage their experience but it's going to be a journey, it's not going to happen overnight.
Host:
And Brendon, then we'll finish with Neil.
Brendan Gibbs:
I really think we're entering a new era of networking that I'd call experience first networking. I think this is a big shift for service providers. And when you start thinking about the promise of transport network slicing, the focus there is really a differential surface treatment. We've had this kind of concept in the past for service providers. But the key focus there is on services. It's about unlocking different economics, different treatment, and ultimately different experiences for the end-users, each within their own sites, whether they be low latency or best effort, whether it be for mobility for consumer broadband, or for business VPN, what have you. It's all about differential service treatment and the key there is going to be the assurance of that service experience for the customers. That's why as the experience first era, I think slicing is going to be a big technology for all service providers going forward. But the key to unlocking successful transitions is going to be that assuring of the experiment for services.
Neil McRae:
I completely agree with Brendon. Just to build on a little bit, slicing and some of these technologies, I call them enabling technologies, on their own, they'll put you to sleep, but with the right application or the right use case, boom. The thing that really made a difference in the MPLS days, the move to IP voice, without MPLS, it couldn’t have happened. That was crucial and service providers made a ton of money out of it and we still do. I think, how does that extend into wireless communications? How does it extend into hybrid communications? Some people at home, some people in the office. How do we really expand upon that experience and take this sort of communication, the next step forward? But I think, from an operator point of view, we kind of provided the coverage of the network and the capability of the network, then we let other people monetize it. And I truly believe if we do that again, we're in real trouble, we've got to create much more services ourselves, in healthcare, in manufacturing, in logistics, in drones, all of those areas where there is space for us to play. If we don't play in that space, 60 and the next investments of network, we won't want to make them because we won't be able to see a return on them. And in my mind, that's crucial. And it starts with a huge level of confidence in the performance and the capability of the network. I think what they are, I think, Brendan... building on his point about that next level of network. I think we're in this next level of network where the network not being there was kind of an interesting 30 minutes. Now, I just think we will never be in that situation. The network has to be there constantly, in our lives, in our world and everything that we do, will be dependent upon it, and we've got to monetize those operators.
Host:
That's a perfect statement, Neil, and a good place to end. I'm glad we had representation, by the way from an [unintelligible 22:19] operator and also an America's operator. So, we appreciate Neil and Aamir giving us their time. Of course, Roy Chua, always good to have you giving us your perspective, you always feel like you have your finger on the pulse often times and so, for that reason, we'd like to have your input on these types of sessions. Want to say a special thank you to Brendan Gibbs and his team over at Juniper Networks. They made this session today possible. So, Brendan and your team, thank you very much for that.
Brendan Gibbs:
Thank you.
Host:
Appreciate it. And again, to all of our views out there, thank you to these session speakers on accelerating the shift to a differentiated service experience for this executive session on-demand, April 26. Please go to thenetworkmediagroup.com, so long.