Another instance of a telco playing dual role of vendor, leveraging its own experience
From today, AT&T and ServiceNow are offering a global telecom product to help network operators manage 5G and fibre network inventory. AT&T provided the strategic design and technical guidance for the development of ServiceNow Telecom Network Inventory, built on ServiceNow’s platform.
Their motivation was that the current approach to managing network inventory is complex and difficult: operators need a consolidated view of their networks and a consistent workflow between connected systems so they can act on data. This is what Telecom Network Inventory platform is designed to allow them to do.
Internal deployment
“Working with ServiceNow to develop Telecom Network Inventory was a great collaboration to create a tool that could help us address an industry-wide challenge,” said Jon Summers, SVP of IT and Chief Information Officer at AT&T. “As we approach our internal deployment, we also look forward to seeing how other operators around the globe might take advantage of it.”
AT&T will provide ongoing strategic guidance as ServiceNow enhances Telecom Network Inventory. The telco said that consolidating hardware and software equipment and services onto a single platform is critical as its networks grow. AT&T plans to use Telecom Network Inventory to gain better insight into network operations and issue resolution.
Francis Haysom, Principal Analyst, Appledore Research, commented, “ServiceNow brings its process-centric approach to network inventory that has often been missing or fragmented before.
“With Telecommunications Network Inventory, operators have an opportunity to better support end-to-end network automation and increasingly dynamic and valuable network services.”