Telstra tunes up with orchestration to enhance automation, customer experience

Recognising that it needs to unlock new business opportunities by being able to introduce new products quickly and seamlessly and also offering business customers an improved experience, leading Australian operator Telstra has deployed a Nokia Orchestration Centre to build a reusable platform as a service, enabling its internal network domains faster time to market.

In a global-first deployment, the roll-out of the orchestration software is also intended to help Telstra automate its inventory workflows for greater simplicity, agility and flexibility. That is, allowing the operator to fulfil services in a more streamlined way by taking advantage of a unified inventory solution, providing discovery, reconciliation and ongoing synchronisation of network and service assets in near real time.

The implementation also supports Telstra’s T25 strategy to deliver growth; “exceptional” customer experience, and continued network and tech leadership. The plan will see enterprise customers have access to what is claimed to be Australia’s largest one-stop-service shop, providing a range of managed and consulting services, telco products (connectivity, cloud, internet of things and cyber security), and in-house expertise to help customers digitally transform and grow.

The roll-out will see Telstra try to find “innovative” ways to deliver AI and data automation across all network types, with virtual domain manager the first internal network domain to be onboarded onto the offering. Using standards-based TM Forum application programming interfaces, Orchestration Centre offers a single, multi-tenanted platform to onboard new tenants and orchestrate the design and deployment of services across multiple technology domains.

The solution is part of Nokia’s Digital Operations software suite and is based on a collaborative delivery model, with Telstra using open software development kits (SDKs). With an open platform approach, the solution enables Telstra to reuse the capability to support new use cases. It is deployed on the public cloud and integrated into a continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

“Nokia Orchestration Centre has helped us to build a true cloud-native, reusable and shared platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering (also known as Domain Enabler as a Service) for our internal network domains,” said Lakshmi Easuwaran, group owner orchestration, enablement and shared technologies, at Telstra.

The deployment comes after Telstra announced a suite of enterprise 5G Standalone automated and orchestrated services based on an architecture combined with automation via network orchestration, allowing customers to imagine and deploy new differentiated services quickly and scale them economically. Such capabilities are designed to enable Telstra to provide enterprise customers with new differentiated services that have the potential to deliver assured network characteristics such as throughput, latency, and the resilience required to support digitised operations and processes.