Continuous Integration (CI): Reinventing the role of SI

From System Integration to Continuous Integration, the world is making a switch and we need to have a pulse of the market.

The Network of the Future (NOF)

The hyper-connected society of tomorrow will be built on 5G, the network of the future, fueled by technologies such as Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. Major telecoms and business verticals will have to undergo digital transformation by embracing changes in their networks.

The cloud-native 5G network that is built on slicing principle needs to be flexible, robust, automated and agile and let’s face it, it does sound intimidating! And there is more to it especially as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is needed to serve latency-critical applications and DevOps is required to improve deployment and operational efficiency.

The Rising demand for integrations

Building this kind of networks requires extensive integration effort to cope with the increasing level of complexity. The old and the new need to co-exist while expanding the supply chain and broadening the base of stake holders. The need of the hour is to automatically deliver new services, scale and upgrade existing services, accelerate innovation and improve the network experience for customers

System Integration (SI) activities are usually centralized whereby all functions be it network planning & design, development & validations, scaled deployment and operational acceptance are conducted in a serial fashion.  This results in many pitfalls including difficulty in component architecture governance, misalignment of technical architecture vs business objectives, anti-affinity towards failure and misalignment of business process, operating model and technology development. They just cannot cope with the volume and pace of business innovation

Let's bring CI

Keep everything running with speed and continuity

To stay competitive in the constantly expanding landscape, Continuous Integration (CI) brings in the much needed new values compared to SI. CI takes responsibility of integrating different points across both technology and process domains. Aligned with business objectives, CI addresses the challenges in setting up a network operating model that eliminates the wall of confusion

CI focuses on three strategic areas to empower telecommunications companies:

·  Digital transformation and adoption of cloud & AI adoption

·  Expanded integration volume

·  Cost efficiency and operational excellence

CI combines integration and test functions. It focuses on integrating work from different teams into secured and shared environment using automated builds and tests to ensure success, improve collaboration & quality, reduce risk and fix problems earlier in the development lifecycle. This provides complete oversight and control, speeds up delivery and accuracy and continuously improves quality and cost function. In a nutshell, with CI, we are building an agile and production-ready product with minimum risk and precise functions.

From telecom engagement model standpoint, CI is based on the principles of Network build, Network operate, and Continuous knowledge transfer. Focus on implementation & operations, CI/CD lifecycle development, enhancement and support phases are the key focus areas of the ‘Network Operate’ phase. The model aids in accelerating the E2E delivery as parallelism in testing leads to improved efficiency of every service.

With CI, the time needed for E2E delivery is significantly reduced. The fully automated and reproducible build, including testing, that runs in parallel processing, greatly improves the efficiency of each service and accelerates delivery. In addition, cloud adoption capabilities, high concurrency, high reliability, and high security are continuously being improved

The next decade will witness rapid digital transformation and CI is a key to empower our customers to effectively and successfully deploy the network of future, today.