Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, IBM. Rational's Product Delivery Solutions for Communication. Service Providers. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM.

Transcription

1 IBM Podcast [MUSIC] Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, IBM Rational's Product Delivery Solutions for Communication Service Providers. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Communication Service Providers -- or, CSPs -- face many challenges in defining, building, and deploying complex software-based systems. IBM Rational telecom solutions and tools are used successfully by various organizations within the CSP industry to address the unique challenges experienced during product development. In today's podcast, Glenn Hughes, solution sales leader for the communications sector Rational Tiger team joins us to discuss how IBM Rational's product delivery solutions for communication service providers are helping the industry. Glenn, welcome to the Rational Talks to You podcast series. Thank you for joining us. We're looking forward to discussion today. HUGHES: Hi, Kimberly. Well, why don't we start with our first -1-

2 question, Glenn. What would you say are some of the challenges facing community service providers in defining and delivering new products to their customers? HUGHES: Well, that is an interesting question. It's one that we have...with the IBM Rational team have spent the last several years focusing on. We work with a number of communication service providers in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and now North America, Latin America, et cetera, et cetera. We're seeing many of the same trends and issues that they're dealing with in terms of the delivery of these innovative new products and services, which are really mandatory in this community because the core revenue being generated historically from voice communication services and the like pretty much have become a total commodity. So, they have invested very heavily, whether it's in the telephone companies, the cable operators, and even satellite providers which we collectively refer to as communication service providers. They have all invested very heavily in three areas. They've invested in building smarter new network systems themselves to get the kind of platform that's open to software development that is much higher cost, emphasizes lower cost, I should say, emphasizing the ability to innovate in a -2-

3 service plane on these new networks, software-based innovation. And they've invested very heavily in the transformation of their mission critical IT systems that have been managed, these new products and services on their networks referred to as the operation support systems and the business support systems. And very importantly they focused and are working with the marketing people and all of the downstream teams that need to collaborate here, both internal to the CSP and third-party partners they invested in, defining new software-intensive products and services themselves. So, there's a huge capital investment that has been already done. And then now they're trying to figure out how do they get the return on the investment with these new products and services. What they're finding is the time that it takes to get from the idea of a new product to the time that it has actually been deployed and is operational and generating revenue takes far, far too long. It costs way too much. And actually the quality of what gets delivered in the meantime is often quite disappointing. -3-

4 So, these issues are where our customers are focused, and correspondingly it's where the IBM Rational team has been focused in bringing new capabilities to innovate faster on the new next-generation networks. A great summary, then, on three key areas being time to market, cost, and quality. So, Glenn, our next question would be how can the silos typical in a communication service provider's organization be broken to allow for more successful products? HUGHES: So that's another good one. So, part of our solution strategy that has been proven quite effective over the last couple of years with these types of customers is bringing forward...based on modern best practices and standards and those sorts of things, we have provided a process driven, quality-driven approach that unifies the team of people that are necessary to get through the entire end-to-end product innovation lifecycle... The marketing people, generally reporting into the chief marketing officer; the network people, actual innovators inside the company; as well as our third parties that generally report conceptually into the chief technology officer; as well as all of the people that need to work to update and integrate these mission critical IT systems, the OSS/BSS reporting into chief information officer. -4-

5 We provided a process, modern best practices on our process, based on agile approaches and those sorts of things that provides streamlining, integration, and a new level of automation that allows these different testers and developers and product managers and project managers and deployment engineers to all work more effectively together. This is accomplished through an integrated platform for delivering software that starts with strategic planning and provides an integrated Collaborative Lifecycle Management capability as well as a linked and integrated DevOps capability which we can focus on a little more if you were going forward. But these three areas are mapped to provide unique role-based automation capabilities that internally provides a kind of integration so that artifacts that are necessary for a designer, artifacts that are necessary for a tester, artifacts that are necessary for an internal or external deployment engineer, we have tools that are based on providing automation for each of those role players and we break down the silos between these different people, which is what contributes so heavily to the lack of productivity and slows the entire process down. We keep track of the internal data that is underlying all of -5-

6 these tools. It's something that we call the Jazz platform, which many of our customers are aware of now, that begin to integrate the tool that is used for managing requirements by an analyst, the tools that are used by a designer, the tools that are used by the co-construction team, et cetera, et cetera. So, all of these lifecycle tools share a common underlying infrastructure that allows all of these changing artifacts of the testers, the coders, the designers, the deployment team, that everyone has an artifact that they're working with, that it's always up to date, even despite all of the change that is taking place as systems, complex systems, evolve. So, this allows everyone to be on the same page, everyone to have a shared view of the truth and can work more effectively together. That working together as a team is a huge source of improving speed and quality of delivering these systems. Great. Well, then, how does IBM Rational support agile practices throughout the lifecycle? HUGHES: Well, one of the things, you know, that we are one of the original thinkers in the agile space with agile techniques. But this is becoming quite mainstream now, -6-

7 which is very good for us. It's one of the things that we're very gratified about, especially with the communication service providers. We really no longer need to evangelize very much on this topic. But even the standards which has been a key part of our strategy providing solutions to these types of customers, the standards embrace our agile techniques. So, we have invested very heavily in actually adopting some of these standards for the IT systems from the TM Forum. They have enterprise architecture -- call it a TM Forum...frameworks. Rational application management solutions specifically for communication service providers, the early part of the lifecycle, directly embraces these standards from the TM Forum as well as other telecom industry standards. We directly embrace those in our architecture management tools, which allows the full accelerated application of these standards in the real-world settings. So, since they have now, TM Forum, for example, has defined a whole initiative around agile business and IT. And this is an industry-specific group, so this agile business and IT is based on agile technical standards, and they've applied it to a set of comprehensive industry -7-

8 standards so that the techniques both at the business level and at the technical level can be applied more...on more directly in a industry-specific context. So, Rational having embraced these into our tool enterprise, architecting tools, tools for solution architects, all embrace these TM Forum framework standards to enable agile techniques to be rapidly deployed by communication service providers. One last final question for today, Glenn. How can the transition from development to operations be optimized? HUGHES: Well, I think that's one of our...hmm. That's actually one of the key emphasis areas that we're focusing, have been for the last year or so, is actually enabling that particular bridge from the development phase to the operational phase with best practices and tools to facilitate there. So, case in point. In our late-stage testing, what is ordinarily considered a late stage testing, we've implemented a service virtualization capability in our tools that allow directly for continuous testing, maximizing quality from early phases of these product delivery projects into the latter phases, so testing is not deferred solely to -8-

9 the end late activities in the project, project cycle. So, we've actually built this service virtualization capability, which is another very important trend. Virtualization is a very important trend in this industry. Network virtualization, business virtualization, mobile systems virtualization is a theme and an investment priority worldwide. So, we've aligned our service virtualization capability with that. And not only is this a very scalable service virtualization capability providing a very powerful test automation, we've integrated that with our deployment with a...also a large-scale deployment automation solution, which is really unique in the industry today given that it provides these two capability areas, test automation based on service virtualization and large-scale deployment, complex deployment automation, which complex deployment is certainly a key characteristic of communication service providers. So, we've had this integrated capability that is now aligned with standards for the industry, probably kind of repeating this notion of embracing industry standards as the strategic part of how we have optimized our core industrial strength solutions to make it readily consumable by communication service providers. -9-

10 So, this really effectively breaks down the silo, the barrier between the development teams and operations teams, which is very key to get the service level agreement, the quality of service goals that these customers are always being held accountable for. Well, thank you, Glenn. A great overview on IBM Rational and the alignment with the communication service providers industry. We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to join us and share your expertise. That was Glenn Hughes, solution sales leader for the communication sector Rational Tiger team, with some key points for today's podcast event, IBM Rational's Product Delivery Solutions for Communication Service Providers. To hear this specific podcast or to browse additional topics, check out our Rational Talks to You podcast page at This has been an IBM podcast. I'm your moderator, Kimberly Gist. Thank you for listening, and we hope that you will choose to keep tuning in as Rational Talks to You. IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] [END OF SEGMENT] -10-