EITC Infrastructure

Outlook 2021
Whitepaper | July 2018

A glimpse into du’s transformation journey towards being

a software defined network in the digital era.

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Saleem AlBlooshi “At du, from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications

Emirates Integrated Company (EITC), we are working diligently towards
Telecommunications Company bringing next generation technologies like 5G, IoT, AI and
(EITC) Blockchain into our network, which will power a new
generation of solutions and services for our customers in
Chief Infrastructure Officer the next five years.

We've never been more excited in our decade-long journey

of multiple evolutions as a company. Although evolution
comes naturally to us at du, we're humble enough to
recognise that the journey ahead will take more than what
got us this far.

The rate of new technology innovations, business models

that thrive in ecosystems of partners, and going forward, a

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data-driven economy has made it imperative for us to

undergo a digital transformation that not only impacts our
technology infrastructure but the way we operate with
agility to embrace the emerging new economic order.”

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Ali Amer “As the digital era continues to shift the paradigm for the
Cisco Systems telecom industry, new opportunities and challenges will
emerge. Fast evolving digital technologies and user
Managing Director, Global Service experiences are raising the bar for telecom service
Provider Sales – Middle East providers like du to transform themselves into ICT services
and Africa providers of choice.

Technology and architecture transformation come at the

centre of establishing a new environment for service
creation. This serves as the foundation upon which
operators can deliver next-level experiences that enable
them to not only adapt, but to thrive.

As a technology leader, we are excited to partner with du

to evolve their offerings to incorporate a wider gamut of
digital lifestyle and enterprise offerings. du’s progressive
vision and its drive for innovation for the future of
communications in the UAE will power a world of new
experiences for businesses and consumers.”

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CONTENT

INTRODUCTION 7

NEED FOR CHANGE 8

Macro trends
Drivers of change
Evolution in business

SYNCING UP WITH CUSTOMERS 10

Consumers
Enterprise
Government
Internal

TOOLING FOR CHANGE 155

Capabilities stack
Transition journey

REORGANISING OURSELVES 177

RECALIBRAINTING OUR MEASURES OF SUCCESS 19

Service Operations
Development IT
Evolution of KPI’s

REORIENTING OUR PEOPLE 233

UPGRADING THE INFRASTRUCTURE 244

Virtualisation
Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)
Automation and Orchestration
Machine Learning

CONCLUSION 30

WORKS CITED 31

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EXHIBITS

EXHIBIT 1 DU'S STRATEGIC PILLARS AND TRANSFORMATION LAYERS 9

EXHIBIT 2 CONSUMER USE CASES FOR 5G 10
EXHIBIT 3 BUSINESS CUSTOMERS IN UAE 11
EXHIBIT 4 DU'S RECENT INITIATIVES IN MARKET 144
EXHIBIT 5 DU'S CAPABILITY STACK 155
EXHIBIT 6 DU'S TRANSITION JOURNEY 166
EXHIBIT 7 DU'S ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE 17
EXHIBIT 8 ELIMINATION OF MANUAL INTERVENTION 20
EXHIBIT 9 IMPACT OF AUTOMATION ON PROCESSES 20
EXHIBIT 10 DU'S EVOLUTION OF KPI'S 22
EXHIBIT 11 DATA CENTRE CONSOLIDATION 24
EXHIBIT 12 VIRTUALISATION AS AN ENABLER 255
EXHIBIT 13 SOFTWARE DEFINED SERVICE PROVIDER 277
EXHIBIT 14 SEAMLESS FUTURE 28

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INTRODUCTION

Technology is hurtling into the future at ever In this paper, we present infrastructure
higher speeds, and the pace only multiplies technologies that du is investing in, such as
every two to five years. While consumers virtualisation, automation, big-data and
enjoy superior new experiences and value artificial intelligence (AI). These are laying
from new digital products, a great many the foundation of what would prepare us to
industries have been disrupted, leaving a embrace the change anticipated in the next
trail of iterated business models and new five years.
value chains.
This paper does not cover the actual digital
For businesses, change is the only constant services and applications, instead we focus
and the successful ones have to innovate on the foundational infrastructure that
incessantly to stay in the game. They have to makes standing up these possible.
be nimble to adapt their organisations, and
preferably lead the change in their industry. In the following sections, we present this
Telecom service providers are not unique in transformation journey at du, in a unifying
that regard, where many are riding the context of market drivers, service
change curve at its leading edge. du is in the capabilities, as well as operational and
midst of such a digital transformation. organisational change that works in unison
with the underlying technology
infrastructure transformation.

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NEED FOR CHANGE

MACRO TRENDS
We recognise a few large-scale trends in data are much different than those of legacy
computing and micro-processors that are businesses, where business models are
impacting nearly every industry. bring re-imagined with digital and data-
driven offerings. Data is the ‘new oil’ [1].
Explosion in computing. A consistent
drop in cost of computing is driving an order Software is continuing to eat the
of magnitude change in the scale of world [2]. Baseline complexities and costs
computing solutions and ubiquity of of physical assets and manual processes are
connected devices. As a result, cloud being eliminated by shift of functions to
computing and IoT are changing the software. Digital innovations are collapsing
landscape of digital services in addition to industry barriers, making cross-functional
powerful smartphones in every hand. products and services possible, and mashing
up previously segregated markets and
Explosion of data. Computing industries. Every physical object can
everywhere is generating data at potentially get networked and be
unprecedented levels, for information programmed.
mining, with AI techniques. Economics of

DRIVERS OF CHANGE
Global Internet users’ penetration is connected, of which smartphones will
reaching 50%, and just above 90% in the account for half. [4].
UAE [3]. Globally, Internet traffic is expected
to grow 3.2-fold from 2016 to 2021, a Service providers (SP), around the world, are
compound annual growth rate of 26%. witnessing drivers of change that are forcing
Whereas mobile data traffic will grow 7-fold them to adapt accordingly.
over the same period.
Pressures on revenue. Cost per bit does
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is shifting not match the growth in bandwidth. Legacy
connectivity from end-user devices to SP’s struggle as they mostly compete on the
machine-to-machine (M2M) connections. services layer ‘at connectivity terms’!
M2M modules will account for 51% of all
networked devices in 2021. 43% of all Shift of value in ICT industry . OTTs are
networked devices will be mobile- capturing bigger share of value away from

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SPs with richer services and experiences. introductions of newer digital experiences
OTT attack SP services as loss leaders to and services from global OTT players.
grow their core business - ecommerce, Always connected, and everywhere, digital
advertising, streaming. consumption is expanding faster in newer
dimensions of ‘augmented’ and ‘virtual
Customers have greater expectations. reality’. Technology and digital experiences
Customer expectations are evolving at for customers are raising the bar for SP’s to
Internet speeds with continuous transform into Digital Services Providers.

EVOLUTION IN BUSINESS
Expanding to digital services. telecom customers with simplicity and breakthrough
service providers are evolving offerings experiences across its three major customer
beyond traditional connectivity services to a categories: 1) Individual consumers, 2)
wider gamut of digital services.
Business customers, and 3) Government.
Driving for operating agility . Most are
redesigning for efficiency and rapid du maintains its focus with key strategic
adaptation to market shifts, leveraging pillars in driving change – a seamless
technologies like virtualisation to shift HW customer experience across channels,
to SW. ‘It's not the big that eat the small, it's innovative services and solutions, and agility
the fast that eat the slow’. in operations. There is a fourth element of
‘continuous innovation’ that renews the
Engage in ecosystems play. It is perpetual momentum needed behind each
becoming imperative to play in new sectors pillar [Exhibit 1].
or compete in new digital ways. Rapidly
introducing new services within an du’s digital transformation runs across the
ecosystem of partners by building enablers various layers of the company, and is guided
for collaboration. by these pillars of success.

du is evolving beyond a traditional telco into In the following sections, we shall go

through these layers to lay out changes in
an ICT service provider. In its journey since
each and how they are all connected.
birth, du has endeavoured to delight

Exhibit 1 du's strategic pillars and transformation layers

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SYNCING UP WITH CUSTOMERS

CONSUMERS
Ultra-performance. Smartphones have Globally, mobile video traffic is estimated to
become intertwined with our lives in reach 79% of total mobile data traffic in
countless ways, but there is a wide set of 2021, compared to 60% at the end of 2016
new use cases that are driving the need for [4]. Gaming related Internet traffic is
new service capabilities for du which expected to grow 10-fold from 2016 to
becomes the basis for accelerated 2021.
deployment of 5G [Exhibit 2].
Multi-channel support. Consumers expect
As an example, video consumption is rapidly uniform service experience and continuity in
evolving from linear to on-demand, with interaction across channels. Single sign-on
higher interactivity in content. Consumers across services portfolio, high degree of
demand for unified user interface (UI) interactivity and personalisation are among
across devices as wells as intuitive ways of table stakes.
integrating external OTT services [5].

Exhibit 2 Consumer use cases for 5G

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ENTERPRISE
Customer expectations
In the Business sector, customer expectations mirror those of consumer apps. End users in
enterprise are demanding consumer-quality in product experiences.

5 times as many visitors, as resident population, visit Dubai during the tourism season. This
creates a need for flexibility in usage of resources to serve the seasonality.

72% customers express interest in VMS, where all or some of the capabilities delivered by
CPE are delivered either fully or hybrid cloud solutions.

88% of business customers surveyed want a bundled security service with network service.

Source: Cisco Survey of MEA enterprise customers in 2017

Exhibit 3 Business customers in UAE

 Service Scaling. They want the flexibility  Managed services. Move business
to deal with variance in operations and workloads and data to hosted private
demands, with particular seasonality in cloud. Businesses, in our market, look to
Dubai market [Exhibit 3]. outsource non-core operations and
focus on their strengths with managed
 Cost Efficiency. Our customers want the services.
flexibility to scale consumption of
services as-needed, with payments on a  Security. More applications mean more
pay-as-you-go basis that reflect the vulnerabilities. Which brings security
usage models. Shift from CapEx to OpEx among the top explicit asks from
model for better cost control. customers, where risk management of
hacking and ransomware are top
 Transparency. Customers expect to have concerns.
greater control of their own product,
service or brand experience, not only to  Reliability. There is expectation of high
customise product features but also availability of service with zero
necessary tools and information to downtime.
resolve issues.

 Ease in management of moves, adds,

changes and deletes. Monitor usage of
services, bandwidth, congestion, etc.

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GOVERNMENT
du is also committed to supporting government infrastructure services towards the UAE vision
2021, a key partner in the smart city initiative [Exhibit 4].

Customer Expectations Service capabilities

 Bespoke Services. du is a strategic UAE  Managed Services

government partner for providing
futuristic services  Data Security

 Security. Government solutions have the

highest demands to ensure the security
of citizen’s data.

INTERNAL
Internal platform innovation is a key stakeholder for setting the agenda for new revenue
opportunities and readiness for future solutions and applications.

Expectations Service capabilities

Following is a list of prominent needs that These translate into an advanced set of
are high on setting the agenda for digital capabilities that are expected to support
services. advanced new solutions of the future.

 Data Driven Insights. Digital sense, AR.  Open API GW

 Chatbot and other A.I based applications  Big Data, analytics

across the services portfolio.
 Artificial Intelligence
 Developer and Partner Ecosystem.
Bringing openness to partners and  Machine Learning (ML)
customers faster partner on-boarding
and service creation with partners.  Deep Machine Learning

 Streamlining customer experience.

Centralisation of API repository and
capabilities for holistic view of services.
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UAE Vision 2021

Smart City du is committed to supporting the government in its
journey of enhancing the lives of people in the UAE in
meaningful and engaging ways, using technology and
innovation.

Leveraging du’s fibre optic network infrastructure and

high-speed wireless internet, du launched “WiFi UAE”,
a country-wide initiative to provide WiFi access to the
public, in line with UAE Vision 2021.

Smart City
As the strategic partner for the Smart Dubai Platform,
du brings a thorough know-how of Dubai’s landmark
approach to smart cities, exemplified by the company’s
ongoing smart city initiatives, continuing investment in
smart infrastructure and long-standing support of
entrepreneurship and fostering innovation.

The Smart Dubai Platform will significantly enhance

real-time and data-driven decision making capabilities
for the city government, enabling city leaders to engage
in community-wide dialogues and analyse rich city data
across multiple dimensions. The Platform will also
enable the continued enhancement of existing smart
initiatives and services through data-driven analysis
and innovation.

The Smart Dubai Platform will become an essential

asset for Dubai’s economic growth and diversification,
stimulating the high-tech sector in domains such as big
data, data analytics, cloud services, and IoT, to drive
value for governments, private sector and individuals.
Local high-tech talent and job skill development will
also increase in response to the developing market.

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Artificial intelligence-powered messaging

Chatbot platform
In partnership with Dubai Future Accelerators, du will
integrate its partner's (UIB) AI messaging capabilities in
its network. Customers will be able to communicate
with du’s customer care and services, devices in their
smart homes and offices via text and/or voice
messaging on the channels of their choice like
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.

360-degree live video

Virtual In partnership with Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority, du
will integrate its partner's (360VUZ) award winning
Reality virtual reality and 360-degree live video library of
content.

Source: du press release

Exhibit 4 du's recent initiatives in market

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TOOLING FOR CHANGE

CAPABILITIES STACK
Combining the service capabilities identified paper, we discuss the technology enablers
in the previous section across customer in detail, shown here in [Exhibit 5], as the
segments, we layer them over the foundational layer. We will also discuss the
transformation layers to build the ‘stack of capabilities in the operations, organisation
capabilities’ across the transformation and people domain accordingly.
layers. In the following sections of this

Exhibit 5 du's capability stack

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TRANSITION JOURNEY
While there is urgency to prepare for new the end of life. Finally, numerous new
services with technology enablers shown services will be introduced and hosted on
[Exhibit 5], du cannot lose focus on the the new platform.
stability and continuity of existing
businesses. The transition to a software The duality exists not only in infrastructure
defined service provider is gradual. and technologies, but operations as well.
We are building agility without
This ‘upgrade’ is a transition journey for du, overshadowing existing businesses, by
into becoming a software defined service adapting both simultaneously and
provider by gradually introducing these new iteratively.
tech capabilities identified over the next two
to three years. As an example, the duality necessitates a
‘mode-1’ and ‘mode-2’ for IT to deliver for
Most significantly, we envision two co- both legacy waterfall approach and DevOps
existing platforms that will live over this (agile) approach simultaneously.
period, where the old will gradually give way
to the new paradigm [Exhibit 6]. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has to
manage both the traditional with our legacy
Moving from a dedicated infrastructure to a model of operating along with the ‘fast
shared one (convergent SP cloud) for all track’ that has elements like DevOps,
network and IT functions will be done in automated testing on datasets for security
phases. Some services will be virtualised and vulnerabilities and consistency.
migrated to the new cloud. Others will reach

Exhibit 6 du's transition journey

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REORGANISING OURSELVES

The right organisational design is the first culture that drives the operations to a more
step for intended operations and processes. agile environment that is abreast with
As Conway’s law [6] indicates, an software development and DevOps. The
organisation ends up producing designs new organisation [Exhibit 7] focusses on
whose structure is a copy of the harmonising the infrastructure as a single
organisation's communication structure. du business unit that serves all businesses
intends to reinvent the processes and within the ETIC.

BEFORE AFTER

Adjacent Digital
Network IT
ICT and
Solutions Life Style
Product / Product / Digital Mobile Connectivity
offer offer Solutions
Services

Operations Operations

Horizontal and Converged

Infrastructure
infrastructure infrastructure

Exhibit 7 du's organisation structure

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Focussed business focus. du has organisation helps in freeing up operational

reorganised and elevated ICT (managed silos of the past and brings contextual
services) and digital lifestyle and innovation awareness across the organisation and
for focus in business segments and helps it react with agility to market and
enhanced delivery of experiences to customer demands. The intention is to de-
customers. couple the infrastructure layer from the
services for enhanced level of stability and
Addition of new services. The continuity.
organisation is built to evolve with new
services and solutions categories leveraging Abstraction of underlying network and
uniform platforms to scale. separating it from service delivery
accommodates the use of software
An integrated infrastructure. A single development methodologies like Agile and
organisation to serve various business units DevOps, widely embraced by web services
with one integrated, converged and companies as way to speed up service
horizontal infrastructure fabric for delivery.
operational efficiency and scaling. A unified
.

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RECALIBRAINTING OUR
MEASURES OF SUCCESS

SERVICE OPERATIONS
Service operations form the bedrock for Availability’ have been replaced by ‘end-
agility, which is a combination of flexibility to-end service availability’.
and stability.
 Scaling efficiently. Capacity expansion
There is a de-coupling of a dedicated and change has been accelerated with
platform team from business and services COTS hardware additions at demand,
teams to create platform and infrastructure with no vendor lock-ins.
as a service.
 Reduced time to market. With ‘one
For a nuanced sensing of market direction, infrastructure’, there is reduction in time
rapid reaction, and a more unified approach variance, effort and processes. It also
to implementation, we are driving a cultural helps in elimination of procurement of
shift from idea generation to rollout based custom hardware, physical installations,
on DevOps practices to support continuous and configuration of corresponding
improvement in a changing environment software.

Drivers for Service Operations  Stability. Support telco grade assurance

levels. Ensure that existing KPI’s are not
 Being service oriented. Focus on being downgraded upon introduction of new
‘service oriented’ percolates down into services.
its measure of success. KPIs like ‘Node

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Exhibit 8 Elimination of manual intervention

Automation will minimise the manual steps Apart from the obvious speed in delivery
leading to greater speed and precision and reduction in manual errors, the benefits
[Exhibit 8]. The benefits of change are go as far as elevation of people’s role in the
perceived across operating areas [Exhibit 9], organisation by freeing up the engineering
which are quantitative measures of bringing talent, which is now applied instead to more
about agility. advanced next generation technologies and
applications and solutions design.

Exhibit 9 Impact of automation on processes

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DEVELOPMENT IT
The operations in ‘Development IT’ have Product Lifecycle Management
evolved in agenda as well as culture. Among
the significant changes, is the rise of IT into This layer is seen as the enabler to reduce
product creation role. IT has grown beyond the time to market of new commercial
traditional OSS and BSS functions, to services via a reusable and flexible solution
support ‘non-telco’ services like smart cities, design
smart homes and digital service. It has
evolved in function to play a more proactive For the new digital services product
role in product creation within ‘Digital creation, we’ve changed the way we
Lifestyle’ and ’Innovation’ businesses. maintain products catalogues and handle
commercial orders across all lines of
Key Drivers businesses with following benefits:

 Multiple channel support. Support rich Centralised Product Catalogue (CPC)

diversity of channels that bring in
customers across applications and  Improved time to market to provide
businesses touch points. A ‘channel faster responses to market opportunities
strategy’ focuses on various channels and competition.
and programs for unification of
customer experience across channels.  Enhanced visibility on existing product
portfolios, better governance and
 Lower Cost to Launch Products. Lower control over product portfolios to ensure
the cost for infrastructure (e.g. services compliance and increased performance.
that require products at customer site).
 Automate product life cycle
 Reduce Time to Market. Reduce time management process.
from idea generation to product launch,
across project categories: (1) Business  Reduce cost of supporting products and
driven projects; (2) Standard IT including ability to modify existing product
upgrade, transformation items, or attributes rapidly.
revamp internal apps; (3) New
technology capabilities that enable offer Commercial Order Management (COM)
management to bring new offers to
market. The purpose of the unified Customer Order
Management layer is to increase the
 Technology Adoption. Keep pace with effectiveness of the order orchestration
emerging technologies and trends that capability for fixed and mobile service
are being adopted in industry for Telco provisioning.
infrastructure evolution as well as
readiness for emerging digital services.  Enables a catalogue driven order
fulfilment process.

 Provides end-to-end service guarantees

for purposes of improving customer
experience

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 Reduces provisioning complexities and whilst using a unique framework to

gives a mechanism to gracefully introduce efficiency in managing and
integrate and manage orders between orchestrating convergent or bundled
multiple systems. offers and the operations and
maintenance of the platform.
 It presents a consistent and unified view
to the business support applications

EVOLUTION OF KPIS
There is also the emergence of new KPI’s
There is a significant improvement factor of [Exhibit 10] that reflect new services and an
traditional KPIs driven by underlying ‘internet services’ paradigm – customer
technology evolution and DevOps operation satisfaction, agility, innovation, self service
in measures such as time to market, provisioning, deflection to self-serving
provisioning and activation, trouble tickets channel, self-care du App usage, new
and faults. revenue generated, new applications using
big-data and mashups, and external API
usage.

Exhibit 10 du's evolution of KPI's

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REORIENTING OUR PEOPLE

du’s employees are evolving with new ways complexity of managing and updating apps
of operating powered by automation. New due to a more modular approach.
skills in analytics, software, and DevOps are
being adopted to step up the speed and Culture. New organisational culture of
scale of change. There are emerging roles DevOps is breaking existing silos and shift to
with more diverse set of digital product a “software-centric” mentality. An
owners and agile-implementation guides. innovation mentality, which is enabled in
part by the ability to launch services in beta,
We aspire to change the culture where we test “on-the-fly,” and iterate fast.
can relentlessly test and learn, launch early
prototypes, and refine results in real time— Roles and Responsibilities. People are
cutting down the development time in some evolving to next generation roles as they
sectors from several months to a few days. free up from legacy middleware installation
and hardware configuration. There is an
As part of adopting DevOps processes, tools extended influence of IT in operations
that allow to standardize and automate support, fulfilment, assurance and billing
deployment and configuration of servers processes.
and applications such as container
technologies, like Docker, and container Skills. There is a merging and elevation of
orchestration and scheduling tools such as skillsets. Software engineers and network
Kubernetes. engineers to become IT generalists. For
example, re-skilling of a Network SME from
It simplifies software development process, legacy network engineer into an SDN & NFV
improves consistency between testing and expert.
production environments, as well as reduce

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UPGRADING THE
INFRASTRUCTURE

VIRTUALISATION

Exhibit 11 Data centre consolidation

The journey of becoming a software defined servers, coupled with the primary, in a
network begins by virtualisation of cluster configuration.
hardware, which, at du, is well underway.
Besides the complexity and long time to
Dedicated Servers. Traditionally, the market, dedicated hardware typically ended
approach to securing new resources meant up with surplus resources, which is capital
dedicated hardware and software per wasted.
application daemon.
Virtualisation. Virtualisation of
In order to achieve high availability, it applications and functions allows the
typically translated into securing additional separation of hardware from the software.

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All hardware resources can be pooled into a Containers – Encapsulating server

uniform platform, in cloud, whereas the application workloads in containers
differences across functionalities and together with stripped down set of, needed
applications are transferred over into the only, OS libraries reduces the resource
software domain. overhead.

The introduction of Hypervisor allowed It also makes the migration of the services
handling of single or multiple physical workload easy and rapid. Containers
servers and present these as multiple virtual technology drives virtualisation much
servers to the virtual machine’s OS. It further and used in combination for
enables rapid scaling of the number and size flexibility and higher availability of the
of servers deployed. infrastructure

NETWORK FUNCTIONS VIRTUALISATION (NFV)

Exhibit 12 Virtualisation as an enabler

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NFV. Virtualisation as a concept was an This is possible without the risk of impacting
enabler for the development of network other users and their firewall functionality.
functions virtualisation and micro services. In case the firewall needs scaling of
infrastructure resources, hypervisor delivers
Traditionally, one big data centre dedicated- it transparently, in the real time.
device would filter the traffic for the various
customers, behind a single firewall. It was Similarly, many other network functions can
administrated centrally by operations be virtualised, such as load balancer,
engineers, who needed specific knowledge intrusion detection and prevention, address
in firewall management. Those large management, customer premises
firewalls were usually procured in advance equipment, packet core, etc.
and would usually be underutilized.
Micro Services. With utilisation of
Using virtualisation and installing firewall containers, NFVs can be disaggregated into
software in one of the virtual machines even smaller functional parts and chained
makes it easy to spin-up a new small firewall together into completely new network
at any time a customer asks for one. function only when needed.

With dedicated firewall for each customer, Network Function Virtualisation is the
it allows us to expose it to the customer for underlying layer for the introduction of
self-management through the self-care UI. automation.

AUTOMATION AND ORCHESTRATION

Automation enables du into becoming a orchestrator, in turn uses, sub-orchestrators
software defined service provider. It brings to talk to all the infrastructure elements -
real-time, faultless control of provisioning both on the network and applications. It is
and management of services. also capable of provisioning and managing
over-the-top (OTT) providers of
Automation helps adopt a programmable infrastructure and applications, creating
orchestration framework that accelerates customer specific service chains [Exhibit 13].
time to market with minimum intervention.
Moreover, it transcends into customer Zero Touch. ‘Zero-touch provisioning’ is a
experiences, such as deflection of customer term usually used to refer to the process of
service to self-service. provisioning, e.g. a Customer-premises
equipment (CPE) without a technician on-
Orchestrator. The end-to-end site.
orchestrator is the abstraction layer
between the business and operations Provisioning is done using the orchestrator
support systems (BSS & OSS). It can ‘speak’ to push the configuration on to the devices
both the language of the infrastructure as or their NFVs as part of an automated
well as the BSS and OSS. The end-to-end

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process that begins once the (v)CPE comes

to life.

Exhibit 13 Software defined service provider

Fog and Edge Computing - To be able to APIs are bridges between mobile operators
process the data from connected devices and partners that enable building new
(typically IoT) in real-time with short services, allow third parties to tap into
turnaround time, some workloads may run certain mobile network functions within
on the edges of metro and access networks their applications such as messaging, billing,
(Fog). It also reduces the amount of data location or mobile money to provide mobile
that needs to be stored on the primary services to their end users.
central location. Data can also be processed
on the IoT controllers and the end-devices With such common building blocks, micro
as well (Edge) with the same motivation. services framework, as well as an API
gateway, reacting to new and unpredictable
APIs. Application Programme Interfaces service requirements are reduced to writing
(API), on top of the end-to-end orchestrator, a new subroutine in software. That is the
elevates the entire infrastructure (network hallmark of software-defined SP.
and IT services) onto the level of software.

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MACHINE LEARNING

Exhibit 14 Seamless future

Telemetry. With automation in place, the Machine learning (ML) and AI. It is the
next frontier for du is to utilise the available promise of the ability in du’s infrastructure
network data in order to make the user to make intelligent decisions based upon
experiences seamless. Millions of devices previously gathered experiences. For SP’s,
connected on the du network generates among the use cases is network slicing and
enormous amounts of data that is collected traffic management such as a dedicated
using telemetry. New capabilities to handle network path from source to destination
large amounts of data and introduce a new with specific characteristics (e.g. low latency
and intelligent du network. and high bandwidth).

Predictive analysis. By measuring and ML and AI applications present great

understanding how the internal and promise in building innovative data driven
external network elements behave in solutions with partners and enterprise
different situations, it is possible to predict customers. Chatbots, IVR, and robotics are a
and adapt to the behavioural patterns for few of the examples that have started
the best performance. emerging on du network.

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Seamless Future. Our journey does not make customer experience even more
stop here, as there are new technologies on natural.
the horizon that will disrupt the future and

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CONCLUSION

Imagine a network infrastructure, where providing the required end-to-end

whatever you plug into it, whether a device experience is the winner. du is building the
or application like voice, gaming or winning network based on the premise that
streaming, it adapts to provide the best every customer is different. We believe that
possible user experience and the best the network should be aware of the
available quality of service. Without the customer applications and agile in adapting
need for special packages, the network is without requiring the customer
smart enough to recognise the device and to struggle with multiple packages and
application traffic and adapt endless options. Making the network
its behaviour accordingly. natural to use and transparent to the users
is our goal.
For instance, video and voice
communication mandate low network The road to such simplicity in the customer
latency and real-time experience at the experience is not a simple one. In order to
expense of some traffic loss. On the other get from where we are today to where we
hand, for streaming services like video or want to be for our customers in 2021, we
live TV, the quality of sound and video is of have embarked on a voyage in multiple
the essence. There should not be traffic loss, dimensions. du had to transform and will
whereas latency may be relaxed. Services keep transforming in order to be able to
like high volume trading in financial lead the way.
markets, real-time gaming, VR, or remote
surgery that demand very low network We continue to stress that the change is the
latency, no traffic loss and high bandwidth. only constant and du’s success equals the
success of its customers and the success of
A network that can recognise the user our employees.
application and in return be nimble in

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WORKS CITED

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2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-
economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource.

[2] M. Andreesen, "a16z Podcast: Software Programs the World," 10 06 2016. [Online].
Available: https://a16z.com/2016/07/10/software-programs-the-world/.

[3] Internet World Stats, "Internet Usage in the Middle East," 2017. [Online]. Available:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats5.htm. [Accessed 01 2018].

[4] Cisco, "Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021," 06 06
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provider/visual-networking-index-vni/complete-white-paper-c11-481360.pdf.

[5] Kagan Industry Report, "On-demand: Video's present and future," S&P Global Market
Intelligence, 2017.

[6] M. Conway, "Conway's law," [Online]. Available:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law.

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CONTRIBUTION

THIS PAPER WAS JOINTLY DEVELOPED

BY DU AND CISCO TEAMS.

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