By Soenke Jens, VP, Services • July 23, 2021
I have been in the telecom business for more than 30 years. Looking back at the days that we call the good old times, I wonder if it was really the good times — or if we are in a better situation today.
In the telecoms industry, and specifically in the IT ecosystem, for many years we have followed a traditional delivery approach — the “waterfall.” Whether it was a greenfield implementation, a swap project, or an upgrade to a new software generation, we had to deal with long project durations for planning, development, and delivery of a project. Every implementation was highly customized, and many customers even asked for the exclusivity of selected features, which made it more complex. And of course, this resulted in high implementation costs, long duration, and risks related to the scope that often changed throughout the project.
Cloud technology brought dramatic changes to the way services are managed and rolled out in the internet arena and for SaaS services especially. These include:
We already see these approaches being implemented successfully in many industries across many enterprise verticals, but when it comes to the telecom industry, it is taking time because of the sensitivity of the software and the general industry perspective that telecom is a “unique case.” We disagree! We believe that assumption is no longer valid as a reason to go cautiously — time to embrace the revolution that is underway!
Following the adoption of cloud-native technology for our products, we at Optiva put an emphasis on redefining the way we deliver our software to take advantage of the benefits and share them with our customers. We believe that CSPs will not be able to ignore or defer the business and operational advantages of cloud-native technology for much longer, and they must embrace the changes necessary in their internal business processes to take full advantage of the value. This includes:
But what does this mean in reality, and how did it change the way we deliver at Optiva?
With the introduction of our starter-package approach and our standard built-in automated testing framework, we are driving a revolution in telecom software delivery.
Before: Test case execution was manual work →
After: Fully automated
Benefits: Shorter timeline, less effort, improved quality — able to run the full test suite within few days or even within hours)
Before: Business use-cases are project-specific per customer case →
After: Pre-defined, pre-configured business use-cases including defined test-scope fully automated
Benefits: Shorter timeline
Before: Overall timeline for a comparable project scope 6-9 months →
After: The overall timeline will be reduced to 2-4 months (based on the customer’s environment availability)
Benefits: Improved TTM
Before: Offering is based on a customer scope discussion, which leads to a “all in” approach →
After: We offer a “Starter Package” with a predefined scope, optimized project timeline, and costs + optional packages to select
Benefits: More competitive, improved TTM, great quality
Are you interested in discovering more about our delivery approach? Request a presentation for additional information.
Have feedback or questions for the author? Contact Soenke Jens, VP, Services, Optiva
Discover more! Read Cloud-Native Architecture — The Database Reimagined.