Unveiling technical challenges for the governance of end-to-end service delivery and autonomic infrastructures

Today's telecommunication operators worldwide need to confront changes in both their business and operational environment. Such changes significantly affect the operators' daily life and quick adaptation is key for them to keep following competition and increase profitability. On the one hand, the services landscape has considerably altered. New types of services have come to the foreground and the service model is far deviating from the rather obsolete model of services with long lifespan, like simple voice, which used to contribute the most to the operators' revenues. This dynamicity significantly strains processes associated with the efficient service delivery to the customers. On the other hand, there is a clear trend towards empowering network infrastructures with autonomic features at the most feasible extent. Profound research in autonomics has delivered sound results during the latest years and even more, there exist cases where autonomics were instantiated in ready to market deployments. Obviously, operators that want to keep postulating considerable shares in this emerging technology and business market, they have to find ways to address the raised challenges while delivering services. We advocate that this can be achieved by modernizing and appropriately organizing operations support systems and management processes, in particular by migrating from the traditional management of boxes to the governance of services and autonomic network behaviors. This paper aims at unveiling the challenges associated with this shift/evolution in the management processes the addressing of which is key for achieving a timely and cost-efficient service delivery on top of heterogeneous and autonomic infrastructures.