In a recent collaboration, Travis Ewert, COO of LightRiver Software and Claudio Mazzuca, Vice President, Strategic partnerships and alliances for  EXFO, discuss what it takes to streamline the management of complex, cross-domain, multilayer network and service topologies.

With the convergence of 4G (and even legacy 3G) infrastructure and technologies with emerging 5G deployments, it’s more important than ever that operators have an accurate real-time, end-to-end view of their network and services topology. Automation, including automated data triaging and processing, becomes mandatory as human manipulation of all that information is no longer an option.

The hurdles that present themselves are a plenty and can include:

• Gaining access to accurate data from disparate sources
• Requirements that data must be of the “real time” variety
• Inventory and accuracy of data

This is where process automation plays a critical role, particularly when it comes to getting a grasp of network inventory.

Whether designing or activating a service, managing capacity, troubleshooting or for any type of automated use case—if a service path is unknown then good luck achieving those goals. The collaboration between LightRiver and EXFO is all about giving operators a clear, accurate picture of their inventory, both physical and services, through the comparison and reconciliation of inventory data with live network data.

To learn more about how Nova Context brings operators an end-to-end dynamic view of network, services and customer dependencies that’s kept constantly up to date, visit the EXFO Nova Context product page.

To learn more about netFLEX and how this network automation platform can reduce the complexities of managing multi-vendor, multi-technology environments, visit the LightRiver netFLEX page.

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