Data
Capitalizing on Data: An Engine to Business Services Growth
Aligning a service provider’s business with its drive for new services and optimized operations relies heavily on one foundational element — data. Working closely with our cable operator members, the CableLabs team recognizes that access to data provides key insights that drive business and technology innovations. Supporting the growth opportunities our members have in Business Services, CableLabs has three projects focused on helping enable our members to capitalize and realize the revenue growth.
Present Growth Opportunity: The Enterprise Market
An expanding number of business services opportunities are driving an increased focus on data. For example, enablement of B2B Ethernet services for large enterprise businesses (500+ employees) that span across multiple geographical footprints requires a common data structure to seamlessly integrate end-to-end solutions. Through incorporating existing global standards and providing necessary extensions based on our member’s insight, CableLabs is designing and developing open application programming interfaces (APIs) to create a common data structure to automate the exchange of data, accelerating the sales proposal, service delivery, and ongoing service assurance processes enabling cross-service provider’s ability for seamless service delivery and support for shared accounts that enterprise business locations present.
Sales Automation & Interoperability Approach
Future Growth Opportunity: Virtualized Service Delivery & Management
While Ethernet services provide the backbone, small, mid & enterprise businesses are increasing the demand for dynamic applications & managed services. Firewall, DDOS mitigation, and multi-site VPNs are a few examples of managed security services that provide an important opportunity to increase revenue per unit served. The emergence and role of virtualized service delivery and management will provide critical infrastructure support to exchange the data needed seamlessly to enable the rapid development and deployment of these solutions. The shift towards a virtualized delivery of products & services is defining the future of network enablement through software-centric solutions with a high reliance on configuration and performance data. Utilizing common data definitions and access methods to network data for reuse across applications will reduce the risk of supplier lock-in, simplify dynamic network management, and enable easy sharing of network data with peripheral applications (e.g., security, load-balancing, and analytic engines).
Industry collaboration that leads to a well-defined data framework will enable the rapid development of new services that can be easily integrated between partner companies. This flexible framework and streamlined integration will shorten new service time-to-market, elevate the cable operator’s competitive positioning, and continue to attract a robust supplier community.
Open API Access & Community Engagement
These trends are driving architecture evolution and a shift away from the historical practice of housing data in a vertical format, which limits sharing across enterprise applications. CableLabs has developed an approach with a reusable library of data artifacts, which includes common APIs, data models, and entity definitions as examples (which registered users can access at diadeveloper.cablelabs.com) that aims to replace the siloed approaches of the past.
The approach strives to support CableLabs members as they begin to unlock the value of their big data reserves, adapt quickly to the shifts in technology, and move towards a software-centric and cloud networking operational world.
For more information on CableLabs projects related to Business Services, please contact Carmela Stuart, c.stuart@cablelabs.com
Carmela Stuart is the Director of Business Technologies at CableLabs.