Orange is aiming to “drastically” speed up delivery of services across its footprint by deploying a Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO).
It said operators are facing “significant challenges” on their networks during the next five years with strong growth in user bases, increased digitisation among enterprises and a boom in IoT connections and data consumption. It noted operators have been bemoaning this growth has failed to have a positive knock-on effect on ARPU.
Orange said it is vital to install programmability and automation on its network to reduce capex and opex and deliver new kinds of services across enterprise 5G and the IoT.
Cisco’s NSO would lay the foundations for infrastructure programmability and automating operations, Orange said. Other benefits would include reducing service activation times, making network operations simpler, and automating services.
The operator added the latter could help reduce the need for manual configuration by as much as 90 percent across mobile and enterprise networks and enable zero-touch provisioning.
Christian Gacon, Vice President, Wireline Networks and Infrastructure, Orange, said: “Cisco’s model-driven approach to network automation and service orchestration is enabling Orange to drastically speed delivery of services across our entire lifecycles.
“Global deployment of Cisco NSO also provides uniform configuration management tools and consumable network APIs for business applications and customer self-service portals.”
Yves Padrines, Vice President, Global Service Provider EMEAR, Cisco added that software defined networking and network automation would help Orange be more innovative in its markets.
Orange announced in November that it was would start using Red Hat’s OpenStack platform to deliver new solutions to customers.