Nokia today introduced a new suite of cloud-native software designed to automate mobile network operations in a 5G environment. Nokia Network Operations Master aims to alleviate technical complexities for operators with a series of new tools for troubleshooting, administration, software management, and configuration management.

“We are the first telecommunications vendor who is bringing programmability into the operations center,” said Miikka Karhuluoma, head of Network Operations Master product management at Nokia, in a video interview published by Nokia. “We are the first vendor and only vendor who can help operators to achieve automation in this level in their operations centers.”

The technical advancements delivered by 5G, particularly the growing amount of physical and virtual network functions (VNF), are placing more laborious workloads in network operation centers. This will also drive changes in network operation centers and require employees to engage in more programmer-like activities, Karhuluoma explained.

"We are now going to go to the environment where extreme latency and quality will be important,” he said. “We cannot expect anymore that humans can, [in] every possible moment, jump into the conclusion of the incoming information and rapidly, sometimes within seconds, react on problems. So we need to involve much more software-driven instances into the picture.”

Nokia claims that Network Operations Master is hardware-and vendor-agnostic, and can respond to various network events and automate actions in milliseconds with the aid of machine learning. The goal is to reduce repetitive tasks and enable network operators to focus efforts on the most critical events impacting their respective networks.

The software suite includes a library of programmable interfaces adopted from Nokia’s Common Software Foundation, test automation, independently scalable microservices, network slicing management, resiliency, and nearly zero downtime for software upgrades. Nokia said the offering also adheres to DevOps practices and includes components of open software.

“With 5G forcing traditional functions, like revenue management and customer care, to the cloud and helping drive software deeper into the network, communication service providers need a modern approach to performing network operations that is automated, more efficient, and scalable,” Nokia Software CTO Ron Haberman said in a prepared statement.

Karl Whitelock, research VP at IDC, noted that “solutions of this caliber and functional completeness are the works of several months of effort.”

While Nokia has repeatedly talked about an “end-to-end” portfolio designed to address operator challenges with respect to its 5G hardware and software, the vendor’s “former network management solution did not meet all of the essential needs for making a simple, easy customer experience for these enterprise customers,” he said.

The Network Operations Master also expands on Nokia’s effort to enable network operators to disaggregate and virtualize network functions in the cloud. “The challenge is that these VNFs can be highly dispersed over hundreds of locations in the edge cloud servers and core data centers, and must interwork seamlessly with the physical network functions in the network to build end-to-end services,” Arnold Jansen, senior marketing manager at Nokia, wrote in a related blog post.

Nokia has been working on a network functions interconnect fabric to help operators unify physical and virtual network functions. The technology will enable network operators to dynamically place those functions “anywhere in the 5G service cloud to optimize cost and performance,” and automatically provision and assure the “necessary transport services in the appropriate network slices to meet deterministic latency and throughput objectives,” Jansen wrote.