ONAP consumption models whitepaper - Purpose section

Section 1.1: ONAP's value & relevance for the industry

We are increasingly living in a "Now Economy", everyone expects everything to be instant and in real time.

Delays and long turn around times are fawned upon and are increasingly becoming bottlenecks for a seamless digital experience for consumers in every industry.

While communications industry helps in enabling everyone around us to be connected and be a part of "Now Economy", we ourselves need to be much better at it. 

Disruptive technology and collective global initiatives needed for propelling us to such a digital future is impacting communications industry more than any other; primarily due to the fact that we provide the critical infrastructure required.

Agility with nimbleness, and efficiency with speed, which are required for this disruptive digitization and inevitable future, ultimately enables this smart society across a wide range of verticals including health, education, tourism, scientific and technology research etc...

Considering the importance and value derived from infrastructure modernization, communication providers are undergoing through major transformation programs around embracing Cloud, deploying NFV & SDN and launching 5G.

These new initiatives are impacting technical architectures and creating new business models and services which a digital communication provider needs for addressing the demands from "Now Economy" consumers.

Possibility to host future services on the cloud (or in a cloud like manner) has posited communication providers into a unique position.

Choices & directions are wide and challenges are huge, along with the network capabilities that communication providers know and understand well, we are having to on one hand compete with OTT / Hyperscalers and at the other hand learn from them and usher in a collaborative future of "Now Economy" opportunities. 

Key is to be nimble & agile to deliver excellent customer experience while becoming more efficient and make network transparent to its users / consumers. 

Technology and Infrastructure modernization has gravitated higher value from hardware towards software and that points the needle towards "As A Service" construct.

Software concepts drifts service design, deployment and management needs to evolve towards new agile paradigms which promptly reacts to customer needs on one hand, while optimizing our network & costs on the other.

Finally communication provider's future mode of operation needs to be changed, focus now is much more on data - this brings concepts like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into the communications world. 

We have to create a platform which enables this 2-sided approach, is based on open standards and is completely software based. Such a platform must have some key features - As A Service Exposure, Service Orchestration, Template Based Service Design, Data Analytics, Network & Application Controllers, Operational Tools etc... to name a few.

Availability of such a platform will help communication providers with the required business transformation and will solve operational pain points to coordinate and automate management of cloud, networking and application workloads in both physical and virtual world.

The future landscape of industry is rapidly changing and will require to re-define caveats of Moore’s law and Shannon limits covering a wider industry use cases backed by a rich ecosystem.

Such a holistic future ambition can surely be achieved if communication providers embrace power of collaboration and crowd-sourcing.

In this new era, communication industry is pooling and sharing best resources for initiatives where previously they have competed.

As we know, Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) was formed to address exactly the same.

Since communications industry embarked on its journey towards this transformation, more or less everybody agrees on principles of opensource initiatives to deliver exponential value, however it is also a reality that the presence of so many open source initiatives in each domain makes it difficult to evaluate, benchmark vendors products and select carrier grade solutions.

ONAP aims to complement efforts by various standards organizations (Example - ETSI - MANO, ZSM & MEC, 3GPP - 4G, 5G, Radio, MEF, TMForum, OPNFV, OVP and many others) to accelerate market adoption, as well as to provide feedback to those organizations.

ONAP is a software manifestation of innate SDOs knowledge and experience with the collaborative innovation and openness offered by open source.

Evidently there is a growing collaboration in SDN/NFV standards/open source communities, and this harmonization effort is paving the way towards the adoption of software driven networking innovation.

Section 1.2: Purpose of the Paper  

End User advisory group has been created by LFN (Linux Foundation) to share views, challenges, and best practices between user organizations, highlighting new areas of opportunity for the developer community.

EUAG is made of individuals from end-user organizations, including telecommunications carriers, cable operators, network, application, compute or storage service providers.

Being the voice of end users, it is important to support the vision of ONAP and its adoption in the industry and at the same time contribute use cases and requirements to deliver maximum value to the industry as a whole.

EUAG's ONAP working group is authoring this paper, which is aimed towards sharing the views on most important considerations as well as impediments towards seamless adoption of ONAP.

We want to articulate various consumption models which are out there to support end users towards deploying ONAP framework and solutions in communication networks.

In this paper EUAG community will try to address some of these areas.