Last month, I encouraged you to come visit our booth at TMFLive! in Nice to see how Cisco's unified service management solution helps Service Providers transform their networks into centers of excellence for building customer trust and loyalty by enhancing the customer experience. Now I am proud to announce that, once again, Cisco has partnered with other industry leaders in a number of exciting Catalyst projects that take the evolution of customer experience to the next level while driving operational transformation towards unprecedented agility and efficiency. I'd like to briefly introduce these Catalysts, and encourage you to visit their booths in Nice to learn more:

1) Big Data Driven OSS

Cisco is collaborating withMoogsoft, Ontology Systems, and SevOne to apply Big Data analytics to operational support systems (OSS). We believe that Big Data will form the basis for differentiation and growth for many organizations across various industries. For Service Providers, Big Data opens up opportunities to better serve their customers, anticipate service and infrastructure issues and meet their SLAs. In this catalyst, we take data from multiple, disparate sources, and then use these consolidated data to take intelligent and automated actions. An example of an action would be migrating a service or application to a data center at a different location to improve services performance or, even better, to avoid service disruptions in the first place.

2)  Recover First, Resolve Next: Closed-Loop Control for Managing Hybrid Networks

We partner with KDDI on this special catalyst project where our focus is on auto-remediation of service performance issues in a multivendor NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) environment. The solution makes use of the eTOM workflow model, the standard business process framework founded by TM Forum, that defines how key operational elements should interact towards the end goal of meeting the customer's service requirements. Unlike the traditional approach where service issues are not resolved until the root cause is determined (due to the limitations of manual processes), this new approach allows the recovery of services first, with the complete problem resolution coming later. This has significant implications to helping ensure a flawless customer experience since issues are effectively and silently dealt with in the background, before they can impact the customer experience. More information on this project can be found here.

3)Operations Transformation and Simplifications Enabled by vCPE

Last but not least, this project is a big collaboration with and led by AT&T and Orange, and many vendors representing the entire service delivery stack. We focus on enabling operational automation and simplification with the virtual CPE, and thereby driving down CAPEX and OPEX, for supporting residential IP services. More information on this project can be found here.

For general information on the TM Forum Catalyst Program and demos, you can visit their website.

Once again, I encourage you to come and experience first-hand, how Cisco, together with our valuable partners are driving transformation through innovation for the new digital era.

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