Lumen taps Blue Planet tech to make network inventory simpler
Masha Abarinova
Lumen will use Blue Planet software to consolidate its legacy inventory systems, providing a view of the network in one pane of glass
It's part of the company's plan to create $1B in "cost takeout" by 2027
Blue Planet's tech also lets Lumen create a network "digital twin" to test simulations for planning
Lumen is giving its network inventory a major overhaul, and it's enlisted Ciena’s Blue Planet for the job. The game plan? To consolidate 17 legacy inventory systems within three years, said Alex Mercier-Dalphond, SVP of operations strategy and transformation at Lumen.
Removing these legacy systems, including Trunks Integrated Record Keeping System (TIRKS) and other “highly customized systems,” allows Lumen to simplify and optimize its operational processes, he told Fierce. Lumen will use Blue Planet to view its inventory in one pane of glass, instead of sifting through several systems to get the full picture of what's happening in the network.
A revamped inventory also lets the company more easily implement offerings such as network-as-a-service and its Private Connectivity Fabric. Lumen’s NaaS product, Internet-on-Demand, launched about a year ago, currently requires a lot of internal manual work to run as “it’s not fully streamlined,” Mercier-Dalphond noted.
“If we want to scale this, we need a new network inventory to drive automation in our operation,” he said.
Telcos still have a long way to go in offering dynamic networking capabilities. As Colt Technologies Service’s Ashish Surti recently told Fierce, “The biggest frustration many customers have with telcos is time it takes to provision services.”
A customer using Lumen’s NaaS may want 100 Mbps service one day, but the next day they might require the 500 Mbps tier. But maybe the customer only needs that 500-meg capacity 5% of the time. That’s where the streamlined network inventory comes in, said Mercier-Dalphond. It provides a “dynamic kind of network configuration” and does so quickly.
During Lumen's Q2 earnings call, CEO Kate Johnson laid out a roadmap to create “$1 billion in cost takeout by the end of 2027" — in other words, cost-cutting — across three areas: network, product portfolio and IT. Inventory consolidation is one piece of the puzzle. Another is to “significantly reduce” Lumen’s product count, she said, “from thousands of product codes to a target of around 300.”
Great Plains Communications is also cleaning house with its inventory. The company migrated its inventory systems to a cloud platform and is currently trialing Blue Planet software for auto-provisioning of residential customers.
'Twinning' in telecom
Another benefit Blue Planet brings to the table is the ability for Lumen to create a “digital twin,” or a virtual representation of its physical network. The company can run test simulations for network planning on the digital twin.
For example, Lumen could simulate traffic from a hyperscaler to figure out how to remove capacity bottlenecks, said Mercier-Dalphond. Simulating a network outage is another use case.
“I think having this digital twin will enable our team to train under as close as real circumstances if there was a real outage,” he said.