It takes only minutes at most to list a vintage lamp for sale on eBay, to buy some shoes on Amazon.com, or to set up an equities trading account at Credit Suisse.
Yet, when it comes to provisioning new broadband connectivity services, the process takes weeks or perhaps months, often requiring human intervention to plug in a copper or fibre-optic cable, flip switches, configure routers via a command-line interface, set up billing, determine service-level agreements (SLAs).
It’s time for the provisioning of 21st-century data services to enter, well, the 21st century. That’s starting to happen, and a key geography for faster-provisioning services is Asia Pacific, where APAC carriers are beginning to embrace the concept of lifecycle service orchestration (LSO) in the wholesale and interconnect markets.
LSO is an initiative of the MEF which defines a range of automation as part of LSO’s capabilities — fulfillment, control, performance, assurance, usage and analytics. The idea is that telecommunications services will be orchestrated among all the participating players in the value chain, including service providers, operators, enterprises, and even end-user subscribers.
The result is coordinated end-to-end management and control, which will dramatically decrease the time to establish and modify the characteristics of the service, but also ensure quality and security end-to-end.
And it’s going to be big. According to the Rayno Report in March 2015, the LSO market is going to be large – $2.75 billion by 2019.
In a presentation at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Rayno Report founder R. Scott Raynovich said that LSO is clearly a real market prospect.