French firm Altran is collaborating with Ciena’s Blue Planet division to help network operators grappling with increasingly complex requirements across physical and virtual domains driven by 5G, cloud and the IoT.

As a result of their co-creations, service delivery across multiple vendor systems should be simplified and automated, enabling operators to monetise their investments faster.

Intelligent automation is the execution of the operational and functional processes involved in designing, creating and delivering an end-to-end service. Traditionally, these processes were handled by domain-specific, siloed operational support systems (OSS) and tools built for static environments. The increasing integration of networking technologies and automation has accelerated demand for process orchestration, a market projected to exceed $9bn by 2025, according to Market Study Report.

Through the collaboration, Maryland-based Blue Planet and Altran intend to pursue opportunities in service orchestration, cloud orchestration, inventory, analytics, network assurance, OSS-BSS integration and network automation.

“Altran’s collaboration with Blue Planet enables operators to seize new service opportunities as they transform their existing infrastructure into next-generation networks that employ software-defined networking and network functions virtualisation,” said Dietmar Wendt, an officer at Altran’s parent company at Cap Gemini. “Our co-creations will help operators shorten time to revenue by simplifying and automating service delivery across multiple vendor ecosystems and equipment that span the WAN, data centre and cloud.”

Blue Planet’s intelligent automation portfolio is an open software suite that empowers service providers with deep insights about the network to optimise business processes, reduce costs and improve the customer experience. Blue Planet is purpose-built for closed-loop automation combining multi-domain service orchestration, inventory federation, with analytics and assurance, unlocking network potential and business agility.

Altran will provide its offerings in the areas of system integration, engineering and R&D services, deployment, and managed and support services. This combined with its software frameworks will be integrated with Blue Planet’s portfolio.

“Our partnership with Altran is key to executing digital transformation initiatives for operators around the globe looking to transform networks and realise the full potential of a software-defined and open approach,” said Rick Hamilton, senior vice president of Blue Planet.

Altran has worked with Ciena for many years, providing design engineering and product services and support.

• Altran has announced plans for its pre-integrated and validated 5G NR software on the Qualcomm FSM100xx 5G RAN platform for small cells. This is designed to accelerate development time and lower development cost for OEMs building high-speed, low-latency private and public 5G small cells and radio units while creating an open 5G radio access network (RAN) with optimised Altran 5G L2 and L3 software.