Automation: Part III of Major Trends Impacting the Mobile Industry

In my last two posts, I covered two of the major trends in the Mobile industry I have been learning about since joining Robin.io recently.  The first trend was cloud-native computing, the second was open architectures, and this last post of this series is about automation and how Robin is at the right place, at the right time: the intersection of these three trends.

Trend #3 – Automation

Thinking back over the ridiculous number of conference calls I’ve participated in over the last couple of months, the term ‘automation’ seems to garner the biggest enthusiastic response from Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).  And I’m not surprised there is much love for automation.  Having been in the Mobile industry for over 25 years, I know the pain and suffering both MNOs and their subscribers have experienced dealing with provisioning of services.  Some services like the provisioning of an Access Point Name (APN) can sometimes take weeks (not a typo) according to a friend who works for a Tier 1 operator.  The new economies of 5G simply won’t allow slow, manual processes to be business as usual.  MNOs know they need to automate service provisioning, application provisioning, upgrades, capacity, policy updates, network healing and scaling, not to mention services such as Network Slicing.

Automation is complex.  Someone needs to code/build the logic and workflows.  For many solutions in the market, it typically means interfacing with multiple systems with multiple UIs.  Robin has addressed these issues by building an amazing tool called MDCAP (Multi Data Center Automation Platform).  MDCAP not only automates healing and scaling, it also enables a new category of uses cases such as RAN-as-a-Service, Core-as-a-Service, BareMetal-as-a-Service and even a MOPs Manager that can auto-perform thousands of tasks with one-click or one-API call.  Rakuten Mobile is a case in point.  When they needed to deploy thousands of application instances, they appropriately planned for a 4-5 month roll out.  Leveraging Robin’s technology, they completed the entire project in a few days (also not a typo).  The OpEx and deployment time savings were astounding.   If I went to any mobile operator CFO today and said I could provide a solution to reduce your OpEx in a particular category by 3-4%, they would drop everything to take advantage.  Now multiply that factor by 10 and you enter a ‘must-have’ category.  As I noted however, automation is complex and open interfaces and APIs are needed to make the workflows smooth and efficient.  Fortunately, as an industry, we are moving quickly in this direction (see previous posts).

Robin: At the Intersection of Three Trends

The Three Major Trends Impacting the Mobile Industry

I’m excited to have found an impressive Silicon Valley startup sitting right at the intersection of three major trends: Cloud-Native Computing, Open Networking, and Automation.  Partha Seetala, Founder and CEO of Robin.io, is quick to point out these trends as he’s driving our team to meet both the current and future demands of our customers and best position our company as a leader in the market.  The timing couldn’t be better for Robin.  A company that is accelerating MNOs adoption of Cloud computing and Open Networking bundled together in a hyper-automation platform is set up for significant success.  I’m glad to be a part of it and am looking forward to an exciting journey!

Thanks for reading along with this series, and please visit our website and see for yourself the innovation Robin is bringing to the Mobile industry.