The document presents research into service automation and provides insight into the industry’s transition to a fully automated and service delivery system.
This shift is driven by standardized business APIs with high reliability, interoperability, and extensibility that enable service providers to scale efficiently across many partners and services, without the need for repeated investment.
“Increasingly, next-generation services, such as Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solutions, will be delivered across an ecosystem of many providers, from retail and wholesale service providers to hyperscalers, to technology solution providers, and so on, and the networks and support for these services will be fully API driven,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF.
“For this to happen, standards-based automation is required throughout the supply chain, with all parties applying a common, standardized set of APIs at both the business process and operational levels.”
Identified areas where automation can deliver significant benefits, including customer service, billing and settlement, and supply chain management.
Key findings show that service providers using standardized business APIs can reduce their order cycle times by 25%; they can accelerate time to revenue for any MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) API compliant order; increase revenue opportunities by becoming a preferred partner; and deploy multiple LSO APIs in about 3-5 months with the help of LSO solution providers.
“Enterprise requirements for cloud-like experiences are driving industry transformation to secure dynamic services in a global ecosystem of automated networks. For example, secure NaaS platforms are a good reflection of this trend as they combine on-demand connectivity, application assurance, cybersecurity and multi-cloud-based services,” said Stan Hubbard, principal analyst at MEF.
“MEF research shows that more than 122 service providers worldwide are now in some stage of the LSO adoption lifecycle. LSO Sonata APIs enable service providers to move from manual processes and isolated islands of custom APIs to an open, interoperable standards model that enables plug-and-play reuse of APIs with any partner and service with minimal additional cost and effort.
