Operators want to create new services quickly, so Affirmed Networks has created service automation software with the fitting acronym ASAP — which stands for Affirmed Service Automation Platform.

According to Angela Whiteford, Affirmed Networks’ VP of marketing, traditional service creation requires a lot of manual processing, involving subject matter experts for each new service such as firewalls, VPN-as-a-service, or launching a mobile virtual network operator, to name a few.

The subject matter expert creates a service recipe from existing methods of procedure. It’s all very time consuming and prone to human error.

The ASAP software automates the whole process, enabling non-programmers to create service recipes from their methods of procedure and execute those recipes across the entire network. It also does provisioning of new services across elements of both legacy and virtualized networks.

“We realized about one and half years ago that we had to solve for legacy and multivendor environments,” Whiteford says. “We’re talking in standard protocol interfaces.”

Although faster service creation is frequently mentioned in discussions that involve the ETSI NFV MANO diagram or similar-looking diagrams, Whiteford says Affirmed’s ASAP is only a component of those diagrams, sitting below the OSS/BSS layer.

It doesn’t compete with legacy OSS/BSS or with management and network orchestration (MANO) of virtualized elements, but it is meant to help with both.