Leuven (Belgium) – Inmanta, a leading software company for the telecom industry, today unveiled Inmanta Connect, its new turnkey automation solution for orchestrating end-to-end connectivity services. This intelligent software profoundly simplifies and opens up network automation to more telecom companies and service providers to offer B2B connectivity services such as VPN on demand.
“With the arrival of 5G and increasing demand for instant and reliable digital connections, telecom companies are facing a make-or-break scenario, where time is of the essence,” says Stefan Walraven, CEO of Inmanta.
What makes Inmanta Connect unique is that the automation software unlocks significant efficiency wins by minimizing both time to revenue and time to market:
- End-to-end automation reduces time to revenue – the time it takes for a customer to order a service and it being delivered – from multiple weeks to mere minutes.
- Out-of-the-box connectivity services reduce time to market – or ‘service creation time’ – from months to days, enabling telecom operators to automate and innovate much faster.
With Inmanta Connect, there is no need for coding or creating workflows. Intelligent self-healing properties ensure secure and reliable connectivity. Customers also get a digital twin, an automated virtual lab, to run tests and upgrades with confidence. The software uses MEF standardized L1, L2 and L3 connectivity service definitions and is completely vendor-agnostic, supporting all major vendors and providers out of the box.
Opening up automation software to all telecom companies and service providers
With this turnkey automation software, large and small telecom operators as well as service providers can now efficiently deliver connectivity services on demand to their customers in a fully automated way from day one.
“We designed Inmanta Connect with both large telecom companies and Tier 3 and 2 players in mind,” adds Walraven. “Even infrastructure providers such as railway and utility companies with private fiber networks can now offer connectivity services or lease their untapped capacity to partners in an automated way.”
Secure and reliable enterprise connectivity
Inmanta Connect can be used by telecom companies, for instance, to provide a direct and guaranteed link between data centers of a multinational corporation for disaster recovery reasons. Or to securely connect an automotive company’s smart manufacturing facility to its cloud infrastructure for continuous processing of IoT data.
Smart automation software at work
Intelligent and intent-based orchestration ensures that the right configurations are applied across networks. It continuously verifies that the network configuration complies to the ‘intent’ and activates self-healing when required.
“Intent-based orchestration is like traveling from any location to your destination (i.e. intent). Whereas most automation systems require static workflows from specific points – e.g. from A to B, Inmanta Connect generates smart dynamic graphs that adapt along the way. Just like your car’s navigation system does,” explains Walraven.
Digital twin to run tests and upgrades
Inmanta Connect also features a digital twin to empower a CI/CD and DevOps approach. Think of it as a fully automated virtual lab where telecom operators can run tests and upgrades with the orchestrator in their own network with confidence. It includes a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for automated testing and a smooth rollout of changes. This is fully in line with a DevOps approach to enable faster engineering, testing and delivery of connectivity services.
New white paper on orchestrated innovation
In collaboration with the analysts from Appledore Research, Inmanta recently published a new white paper on the relevance of orchestration in innovation and delivery processes in the telecom industry.