Blue Planet Proactive Network Operations tool helps avoid network outages, says Ciena

Ciena’s (NYSE: CIEN) Blue Planet division has unveiled its Proactive Network Operations (PNO) capabilities. Through a combination of artificial intelligence and the ability to leverage other Blue Planet software tools, PNO can help network operators avoid up to 95% of fiber network outages detectable via Ethernet and optical loss of signal (LOS) anomalies.

PNO seeks to streamline what is typically a fragmented problem troubleshooting and resolution process often predicated on fragmented approaches that require significant manual intervention, say Ciena’s Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president, portfolio marketing, and Mina Paik, director/senior advisor, portfolio marketing. The closed-loop automation capability, expected to become available by the end of this year, leverages the port-level anomalies behavior detection features of Ciena’s Network Health Predictor as well as Blue Planet Analytics to aggregate data (and a set of professional services “to support key system integration points”). It then analyzes this data to detect potential issues before the occur and offer recommendations for resolution. Network operations center personnel can then enact these recommendations via Blue Planet Orchestration or similar platforms.

PNO comes preprogrammed with a set of anomalies and prescriptions. Network operators can then fine tune these problem/resolution sets as required, and the system will do the same for itself via artificial intelligence. Paik and Prudhomme note that the system is not designed to automatically take corrective action when issues are detected; network operators don’t want that level of automation yet, they say.

“One of the biggest challenges CSPs face is the ability to predict and proactively resolve network outages,” commented Adaora Okeleke, senior analyst, telecoms operations and IT, at Ovum via a Ciena/Blue Planet press release. “Blue Planet’s PNO solution implements AI techniques such as machine and deep learning to predict and enable automatic resolution of network failures, allowing CSPs [communications services providers] to drive efficient operations and improve the overall customer experience.”

Blue Planet also has developed an opex savings calculator that estimates the potential savings PNO can enable. The calculator says that use of PNO will enable network operators to save up to 38% in trouble-to-resolve opex annually.

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