ACTON, Mass. -- Affirmed Networks, the leader in virtualized mobile networks, today announced the availability of the Affirmed Service Automation Platform (ASAP), a solution that allows mobile operators to reduce the time-to-market and operational costs of introducing a new service by as much as 90%. By bringing automated service provisioning to legacy and virtualized networks, ASAP dramatically accelerates service delivery and operator profitability. These savings, and the market opportunity for mobile operators, are outlined in a new business case highlighting the financial benefits for operators across a range of new services offerings.

Through automation, operators are able to develop new service offerings more quickly and efficiently without the need for complex coding or the risk of unnecessary errors associated with the today’s manual approach. Affirmed Networks’ ASAP solution provides the automation required to simplify the provisioning of these new services across proprietary systems and elements of both legacy and virtualized networks. This provides accelerated time-to-market and greater overall profitability for operators looking to expand revenue through new service delivery.

“Today, NFV is being deployed globally as a result of the transformational benefits it can provide in terms of both cost savings and revenue-creation,” said Angela Whiteford, Affirmed Networks’ Vice President, Product Management and Marketing. “Automation is the missing link that enables rapid service creation in legacy and virtualized environments and allows operators to create new services that were not possible before in their current environment.”

To quantify the impact of automated service provisioning, industry analyst firm Core Analysis recently conducted an independent study focused on the operational and financial benefits of this approach. The study, co-sponsored by Affirmed Networks, Mellanox and Red Hat, examined the business case of a virtualized automated service provisioning environment. According to the study, network operators that deploy automated service provisioning can experience significant savings and faster time-to-revenue when launching services. The study highlights several common use cases, outlining savings related to the delivery of specific types of new services, including:

• Provisioning of new Enterprise customer for VPN-as-a-Service – operational savings of 76%-87%;

• Launch of a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) – operational savings of 92%-97%;

• Provisioning of multiple sponsored data or zero rating plans 83% - 97%; and

• First to market services such as demand or congestion-based charging, niche and micro-services or enterprise traffic management self-services.

“Mobile Network Operators are struggling to compete with agile web companies. Being able to launch, modify, and kill services in a matter of days, rather than months or years is crucial to capture consumers’ and enterprises’ business,” said Patrick Lopez, Founder and CEO of Core Analysis. “Current network architectures simply do not allow fast services provisioning and roll out. An automated service creation environment that can lift legacy networks to the cloud’s levels of agility and elasticity can be a game changer.”

The ASAP Platform: Automating & Accelerating

ASAP automates and accelerates service creation allowing operators to become increasingly nimble in the development and delivery of new offerings. Providing broad service automation across a wide range of standard network element interfaces, ASAP enables non-programmers to quickly create service templates or recipes from existing methods of procedure (MOPs) and execute those recipes across the entire network, providing a complete solution for full service-instance lifecycle management. As was highlighted in the recent research, the automation capabilities contained in the ASAP solution are capable of contributing material operational savings for operators across both legacy and virtualized network architectures.

Partner Support for ASAP

EMC Quote:
“Earlier this year EMC and Affirmed Networks collaborated to deliver virtual probe capabilities with real-time analytics to help enable operators to ensure the highest levels of service quality for their customers,” said David Hudson, General Manager, Telecom Transformation, EMC Corporation. “The introduction of a truly automated service creation platform builds on this approach by allowing any operator -- regardless of network type -- to accelerate service creation and gain real-time insights into the performance of those service offerings across the network.”

Mellanox Quote:
“As a leading supplier of high-performance data center networking solutions designed to hyper-scale web and cloud service providers, Mellanox shares the vision and commitment with Affirmed Networks in helping Mobile Network Operators achieve profitable growth through agile service creation,” said Chloe Jian Ma, Senior Director, Cloud Market Development at Mellanox Technologies. “The foundation of this initiative is a cloud-native NFV architecture and Affirmed is a pioneer, embracing modular software design and automated service orchestration and management through ASAP. As such, Mellanox complements Affirmed Network’s virtual EPC by providing critical elements of NFV infrastructure which enable cloud-native NFV deployments to perform optimally and efficiently.

Affirmed Networks Inc.