Publication date:

26 Aug 2021
Author:
James Crawshaw, Principal Analyst, Telco IT & Operations

How BT developed its

own next-generation
OSS

Brought to you by Informa Tech

 How BT developed its own next-generation OSS 1

Table of Contents :
Omdia view ..................................................................................................................................2
Appendix ......................................................................................................................................5

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 How BT developed its own next-generation OSS 2

Omdia view
Summary
Over the last four years, UK incumbent operator BT has completely rebuilt large parts of its operations
support system (OSS) estate using open-source software. This has enabled it to reduce cost and increase the
agility of its operations.

A transformation in four years and five projects

When BT began its OSS transformation it was running around 350 different IT systems to support its
network operations, much of it 15–20 years old. Each business unit (global, consumer, fixed, enterprise,
etc.,) had accumulated its own systems over the years. There was significant scope for rationalization, and
even today, after a 40% reduction, BT’s OSS stack has around 180 different systems.
Responsibility for OSS lies with BT Networks, an internal unit that builds and operates BT’s networks, data
centers, platforms, and OSS systems. BT Networks serves the customer-facing units of the company:
consumer, enterprise, and global (for multinationals). BT’s Vivek Murthy, director of Hybrid Cloud and OSS,
led the design, build, and operation of the next-generation OSS that manages networks and data centers
across BT’s UK and global infrastructure.
Under Murthy’s leadership, BT has built a talented team of around 300 engineers, designers, and architects
across India and the UK. It has created several new software applications that have improved the way its
networks are designed, built, and operated. For some complex areas, like 3D visualization of real-time
inventory, they also worked with small development teams via the Topcoder crowdsourcing platform. A
profile of BT’s Next Gen Network Management Visualization 3D Render Challenge can be found here. Other
organizations that have turned to Topcoder for software development include Adobe, Microsoft, and NASA.
Before deciding to build its own applications, BT scoured the market for suitable commercial OSS offerings.
Many of BT’s OSS are still supplied by vendors. However, the general thrust of BT’s OSS refresh is that by
building its own software using open-source components, it has been able to create solutions that are more
closely aligned with its business processes and workflows. Moreover, it has done this more economically
than if it had continued buying commercial software. BT also studied the Linux Foundation’s ONAP project
at one point but decided that it was simpler to architect its own solutions leveraging discrete, smaller scale
open-source projects.
The OSS transformation included five key projects:
 Workflow management tool for the end-to-end plan and build process
 Unified inventory
 Catalog for service and resource management
 Service activation engine
 Assurance

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 How BT developed its own next-generation OSS 3

Plan and build

Like most large telcos, BT had multiple systems for planning and managing the buildout of its networks. This
disjointed approach slowed the evolution of their networks and reduced their time to market. BT needed
more intuitive solutions that could handle end-to-end planning. It wanted a solution that could facilitate
desk-based planning, allowing engineers to understand the state of network resources while working
remotely. This would enable them to easily identify the need for additional switches and routers in a local
exchange (central office) or datacenter.
The new workflow systems leverage open-source workflow and decision automation platforms such as
Camunda and jBPM. By standardizing the network planning process and increasingly using TOSCA template
for planning rules, they were able to achieve a high level of automation. With the click of a mouse an
engineer can start a workflow that includes the physical capacity build and cabling, for example.
BT’s network delivery director, Martin Wood, who worked closely with Murthy and his team, believes that
reimagining processes and using open-source tooling has yielded rich dividends. BT used to have many
hundreds of people involved in these plan-and-build processes. Tasks involved many steps and human
decision points. With the new software, this has now been reduced by 60% with increasing emphasis on
doing more sophisticated DevOps-like work. The more automated approach has reduced the time for
capacity planning by up to 50% and increased the accuracy of designs.

Unified inventory
We often hear from operators that inventory is a major pain point for their operations and planning.
Inventory data resides in isolated silos, is inaccurate, and out of date. To address this challenge BT
developed a unified solution: Service and Resource Inventory Management System (SRIMS).
The team used the open-source NoSQL graph database for the solution, as opposed to the traditional
relational database approach. Graph databases are good at modeling complex environments with multiple
relationships between entities. As such they are highly suited to telecom networks, responding to queries
much faster than relational databases.
With SRIMS, BT has been able to consolidate physical, logical, and service inventory into a single source of
truth. The time to onboard new network capabilities has been significantly reduced, and with a real-time
view of network capacity, resources can be quickly reallocated thereby reducing the time to roll out new
services.
SRIMS has a 3D visualization tool that offers engineers a service view, customer view, product view, and
physical view, all in real time. Network planners no longer need to rely on spreadsheets to find out how
many ports on the back of a router are free. This has significantly simplified the design and planning
process. The 3D visualization tool was developed at very low cost in collaboration with the Topcoder team,
as previously discussed. After the initial competition, the winner was hired to scale up the solution to meet
BT’s needs.
Thus far BT has consolidated multiple inventory systems into SRIMS, with the remaining systems planned
for later this year and next. BT has saved millions of pounds with SRIMS by retiring multiple homegrown and
commercial inventory systems. Paying for enterprise support is still an important part of the techno-
commercial model with open-source projects, but the costs are a fraction of what BT used to pay for their
legacy commercial inventory system.

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 How BT developed its own next-generation OSS 4

Catalog, activation, and assurance

The other major OSS projects were for service catalog, activation, and assurance. They have a similar
rationale of retiring multiple commercial and homegrown solutions and replacing them with newly
developed applications based on open-source components.
BT had multiple catalogs that it has unified in a single catalog for service and resource management. The
catalog is based on YANG data models that describe configuration information for network devices and
services. TOSCA templates add modeling constructs to the catalog in support of orchestration.
For service activation, BT moved from multiple, siloed systems to what it calls its open-source-based, next-
generation activation engine (NGAE), a cross-domain activation tool that can provision complex services
over hybrid networks: fixed, wireless, IP/MPLS, SDN, and NFV, for example.
For service assurance, BT developed a Camunda-based fault management system to manage its incident
and change-management process. It collects network telemetry during the day and works alongside
another homegrown, open-source-based network performance management tool that recommends which
customers should be moved to new VLANs to avoid congestion. It then triggers the workflow into the plan
and build system to move those customers over the course of a few seconds. Operations teams were
initially nervous about letting the system make these decisions autonomously but after a year of trials it had
proved its accuracy and won their confidence. BT thinks the system could be improved further if network
vendors would give it access to all the telemetry it would like. BT is still a year away from being able to use
rich telemetry to move fully from reactive fault fixing to proactive and preemptive measures.

A reduced reliance on commercial OSS software

Overall, BT’s strategy is to simplify its OSS architecture, allowing the network infrastructure to be consumed
through a set of well-defined APIs (infrastructure as code) so that BT’s customer-facing units can easily
design and sell innovative services. Simplification does not mean throwing away all the existing systems and
building everything again from scratch using open source. BT continues to use some commercial OSS
applications. ServiceNow is increasingly finding traction for ticketing, incident, and change management.
Other examples include Ciena Blue Planet (used for service orchestration), SevOne (network management),
and EMC Smarts (alarm correlation and monitoring). However, the transformation has enabled BT to shut
down many legacy commercial and homegrown applications in areas such as inventory and capacity build.
BT has found that commercial OSS products work well for business processes that are generic across the
industry. However, BT couldn’t find off-the-shelf solutions for network inventory, planning, and activation
that aligned well with its own processes. Examples include the ordering of spare parts or raising a purchase
order. These processes are what allows one network operator to differentiate from another; hence BT took
the decision to develop its own systems using open-source software components. These systems were built
in conjunction with partners and BT relies on enterprise support for its open-source software to ensure
reliability and get additional features that aren’t part of the community edition. However, overall, BT has
reduced its reliance on software vendors for OSS, reducing cost and enhancing the agility of its operations
through more tailored solutions.

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 How BT developed its own next-generation OSS 5

Appendix
Further reading
BT’s new IT stack enables platform business model and better integration with customer IT (November
2020)
BT Group Update (September 2020)

Author
James Crawshaw, Principal Analyst, Telco IT & Operations
askananalyst@omdia.com

© 2021 Omdia. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

 How BT developed its own next-generation OSS 6

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