John Malzahn, Automation Product Marketing Manager, Cisco Systems | Richard Piasentin, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, Accedian| Richard Piasentin, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, Accedian

For communication service providers (CSPs), the network trends of cloudification, open, software-based infrastructure, and multi-vendor environments are a double-edged sword. On the plus side, these trends break the long tradition of vendor lock-in, freeing service providers to mix best-of-breed solutions that provide competitive advantages.

But with that freedom comes new and daunting responsibilities. It's now up to CSPs to ensure that all those disparate solutions, APIs, and network functions work together flawlessly. And in the case of mobile networks, operators havetwosteep learning curves to climb simultaneously: Open RAN and 5G standalone core networks.

Multi-vendor interoperability challenges highlight the need for vendors to collaborate on solutions that are pre-integrated so they're ready for flawless deployment. This would free CSPs from the time and expense of performing extensive integration and testing - tasks that delay service launches. Pre-integrated, best-of-breed solutions would also deliver faster time to revenue for those new services. Closed-loop automation with tightly integrated network and service orchestration and assurance is the ultimate goal for efficient operations in this new environment.

Another major benefit is confidence that those services will have the performance and quality of experience (QoE) that customers expect. But to maximize that benefit, operators will need real-time, KPI-level insights into those network components across network domains, as well as the services and customer applications running over them. These insights are key to understanding the customer experience and differentiating services with competitive enterprise SLAs.

Automated Assurance and Orchestration that can Handle SLAs at Scale and Speed

By tightly integrating automated assurance and orchestration, Accedian Skylight with Cisco Crosswork enables closed-loop automation based on end user experiences at microsecond speeds. In addition to real-time insights and actions, the solution enables CSPs to return later and configure their network to fix problems or enhance QoE.

Speed is critical because customers - businesses and consumers - notice within seconds when their connection suddenly slows down or is lost. This puts enormous pressure on CSPs to find and fix these problems as they're emerging,beforecustomers start to notice. That's a tall order because operators need to do that 24/7/365 at scale: thousands of types of applications and services with tens or hundreds of millions of simultaneous connections now, and even more in the future as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes even more prevalent.

Service providers need to act at a microsecond level and it's a tall mountain to climb, but Cisco and Accedian are here to help.

Accedian Skylight and the Cisco Crosswork Automation platform show what happens in every millisecond and enables service providers to automate intervention, stay in control, and deliver assured customer experience in real time.

Insights in real time are driven through the APIs and cloud native carrier-scale Skylight Architecture, simultaneously collecting and correlating critical network performance at an individual packet level sourced from efficient sensors in the network to measure latency and packet loss. When milliseconds matter, Accedian and Cisco automation are mission critical.

To learn more about the benefits of Accedian Skylight with Cisco Crosswork, check out this video interview with Mobile Europe. We also encourage you to take a closer look at Cisco Crosswork to learn how it can improve your network.

Planning to attend Cisco Live in Las Vegas June 12th-16th? Please visit us in the World of Solutions Innovations Showcase and Accedian booths (#1563) where we'll be featuring demos of our Crosswork automated assurance solution as well as a featured speaking session, BRKSPG-2474.