Revolutionizing Telecommunications with Rohit Batra at ServiceNow Knowledge 2024

This is Textron tv. Hello. And we're back at the ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 conference.

And now we're gonna be talking about telecommunications with Rohit Batra. Lots going on in this particular space, lots of complexity. You guys have recently rolled out some updates to the services and platforms that you provide here.

What's going on? Um, so telecommunication was a first vertical where we built an industry product. This was back in 2020, uh, in September.

Over the past four years, we've innovated our, our, our applications stack considerably. Uh, we started off going in the service management space, the space that we were the most probably known for. And as we look to customer case, customer requests coming in and customer demands, we moved into the order management area.

Order management was important because it was about workflow. It was about automation. It's about getting a request in and then orchestrating the order across different milestones that needs to happen.

Integrated the different backend systems, including network systems because you wanna see the capacity, you wanna see the network inventory if it's available, and then being able to deliver the order when a t when a customer asks for telecommunication provider. So that was the second innovation that we did. We did work around, um, our service operations management, which was to do with event correlation.

You know, networks are gonna happen, have issues, you get data in from these network and fall performance management systems. We do correlation, we identify when the network is getting impacted, but we also identify what customers are getting impacted and then we notify the customers in a proactive manner. We have a product into our, into our, into our ecosystem, which is basically for field service management.

And we saw a lot of applicability of field service management in the telecommunications industry because when you're going out and building a network and your infrastructure, you need work workforce, uh, people going out there, technicians going out there doing installation services. If you're doing break fix because you have schedule maintenance of these network equipments, you need your workforce people going out there. So we had a lot of integration built between our field service management product and our order management product.

The couple of two, two things that we've done in a recent announcement. One has shift into CPQ, which now gets in the, especially in the telecommunication vertical. That's a way complex problem.

Customers have struggled with doing deployments of CPQ for many years. Combining CPQ with service management into one domain has been a very interesting mix for us and we're seeing a lot of customer interest driven on that. And the other areas we going further southbound into our capabilities when we are getting into a network inventory domain, becoming the system of record to identify what does your network have, what capacity do you have across your physical, virtual, and logical inventory and being able to plan and build your network.

Um, and also as part of that, discovering your network itself and being able to understand what is in your network so you can plan better and make sure your CapEx investments are in the right places. Every organization, heck, almost every individual has a horror story involving an engagement with a telecom company. It's just the way of life.

That's right. Um, and the first thing is, you know, they get bent outta shape and then it gets resolved. But there's always this moment when the resolution occurs where people look up and go, well how come they didn't know about this?

And how come I had to call them and tell 'em about this? I mean, what is the fundamental challenges that you see telecom companies out A hundred percent. So I'll, I think if you look at the telecommunication industry, the infrastructure in the network is layered, right?

And I think that brings up a certain level of challenge. And historically there've been tools that customers have used to monitor every layer. So I, I'll give you an example of a customer we spoke to in Europe.

They had one tool that was managing or monitoring the physical applic physical layer of the network. And then there were services built on top of it. And then another tool that was monitoring it.

Now, if your physical infrastructure gets cut, so let's assume there's construction happening in your road outside your home, somebody drills something in your network, your fiber cut has happened. Now your physical layer that's being monitored, that will start giving alarms. So if you have your network operations team, they'll see alarms indu into the console and they'll see everything is, everything is in red.

Well, your still have also gone down, so there's a different part of your application stack that's monitoring that application. There's also giving alarms. Now IF I'm in the knock, there's only so much that I can focus on.

I've got multiple streams going, different alerts going on, what do I focus on? And that's been a challenge. And the other element of this is I can understand what network is going down, what part of my network is going down, but the association of that network to the customers that are using the service that runs through that network, that association has historically been very difficult for our customers to do.

So they might know that a part of the network is down, but they may not know what customers are using services that rely on that portion of the network. And that's where ServiceNow comes in. So the first area, the first example that I mentioned, we sit on top of these different monitoring tools and we correlate data across these different monitoring tools.

And the reason why we do it is because it's basically built on our CMDB. And I think that's a secret source of service. Now we've historically had A-C-M-D-B that was very IT centric, but over the past few years we've worked on building it into a telecom model.

So now you can model your entire infrastructure, which will now tell you if your network push of your network goes down, we will tell you what network went down, what services we're running on top of that network. And by the way, because we work on the customer layer, we also know what customers are using services that running on top of that network. So we can connect all of that and a matter of minutes tell you what customers are gonna get impacted, what assets are gonna get impacted and what you should focus on.

We hear a lot about ai, is that also gonna help us kind of compress the alerts to know what the root cause of things are Because Absolutely when I go visit these folks, you're right, there's tons of alerts and I can't figure out any of this stuff. That's right. So AI comes in, in a lot of ways.

AI ops, when you think about the network layer is very, very important because you can see historical trends and you can start predicting how these events are correlated together. I can look at CMDB, I can look at all kinds of different models to know that these are events that are all linked to the same issue and I can suppress them and I have one thing to focus on, which automatically is where I'll drive my energy of my team, I'll drive my, my workforce, I'll drive my technicians to go out there and fix that. So that's when AI will come a significant role.

And then of course with generative ai, we can work across automating the entire value chain, including notification to the customers. We have seen the other extreme where I've got all these services, all lights are green, everything looks good, I should be relaxed, and yet the phone is going off the hook and people are screaming. That's right.

So how do we kinda get to the, you know, to your point with all these different systems that are monitoring things, how do I work that flow so that I can understand that? And you know what, just because everything's green doesn't mean it's not broken. Yeah.

So I think there's, there's things that we have to know. For example, on the network side, this is very, very important, right? So let's take for example, typical corporations will have a network connectivity with a service provider, but they may not have one, just one primary network.

They may have a secondary network that's also in there because for failover purposes, their primary network may go down. You might still see everything is green because the failover is working fantastic. But the failover may not have the same capacity as your primary network.

So it's working, but doesn't mean that's performing at the level that the organization expects because the performance has gone degraded. Because that's a shared circuit, that's a shared link between multiple different organizations. So you've gotta get a level, you've gotta have the visibility of what is really in your network.

And this is where discovery plays a very important role. You've gotta be able to discover what's in your network so that you can have the accurate representation of what's in there. Some of the times you can have an alert coming in or our customer may call in about my network going down.

But you may not even know that's actually changing the network, right? So somebody may have gone into the network, pulled out a card and put something else in. How does the IT system know about the fact that something has changed?

So that's when we made the acquisition about a technology called Net ace, which is part of the ANet organization based out of Israel. And NASE has worked a lot with these service providers and telecom industry to do discovery of the network. And when they do discovery, they find out the entire representation of, let's say a router.

They know the chassis, they know the slots, they know the cards, they know the ports, they know what's connected to what. And as you get more involved of that discovery into the system, now you have the most accurate representation of your network. Once you have the accurate representation of your network and you can trust the data, then you will get information that will be very relevant and then you can start notification.

We can get better representation with requested. How do I know what's happening on the network? 'cause it's kind of a dynamic environment.

Absolutely. People rip out switches and routers, uh, people attach things to networks. They're without telling anybody.

Exactly. Yeah. How do I know what's going on?

Yeah. So the nease acquisition allows you to discover. So we'll go out, I'll send messages onto the network, we'll say what's new for the last time I went out, tell me what's changed.

We'll get the data in and then on the service platform we'll be able to then correlate that information. This is what we had before, this is what we have now, is this the data that we trust, which we most likely will. And then we will overlay that information on top of what we already knew.

And then you get a better source of the information. So in the past we've done this on the IT side, but on the telco side we've relied with partnerships or relied with other other tools that might exist that pushes the data in. Now that it's all in the service, our ecosystem, it helps us, you know, extremely to be able to get that data in very quickly and make sure that CMDB is the most accurate representation of what's on network.

Do you think that telecom customers are putting more pressure on them? Because as I look around the world now, the applications are more distributed than ever. There's more stuff running out at the network edge as as well as the cloud.

Yeah. Always seems like that network layer, it's uh, the single point of failure or there's an old joke that says, you know, what's the one thing a developer and an IT admin can agree on? It's the network guy's fault.

Um, No. So I think absolutely, I think there's a lot of pressure in telecommunication industry. If you look at the industry, I mean we've seen single digit growth over the past couple of years.

So the growth is limited, right? If you look at the B2C division of a telcos, there's hardly any growth. The business side is growing, there is, there is profitability there, but it's not growing at a pace as to what you're investing into the network because the demand from the network is so high, every industry wants solutions for them.

We as consumers want more from our networks. And I think that investment in CapEx is becoming more and more year after year. So as we think about the overall margin of the industry, it's continuing to have a lot of pressure on, and I think that's really driving things like automation, looking at AI with the regenerative AI in terms of pulling costs out of the operations and trying to show much higher profitability.

And I think that's the trend that we'll see over the coming years. And each network packet is not of the same business value. So I need to prioritize that, but I need to know what's going on.

So how, what level of sophistication do the telecom people have to understand what each individual packet actually represents? That's a good question. And I'll say today, not much, right?

But I think that's where the industry's going to. We were speaking to one of our customers in Europe and they said they wanna be able to do like a lot of pressure's been put on, let's say sustainability and governance, right? For, for telcos as well.

You've got a carbon footprint and everybody's trying to reduce it. But you think about the content that's getting created, all these content that's getting created daily by a lot of influencers, but a lot of content companies that are froze from a telecom infrastructure. So you need to be able to show the footprint and the traffic at an application level as opposed to just data packets.

To your point, not every data packet is the same. If there's a data packet that's carrying a video, which should be best effort. If I'm watching it in my home or in my car, that should be best effort.

But if I'm doing, maybe if I'm running my business on a secure tunnel, I wanna make sure that our packet gets probably higher priority in terms of data moving, um, across different organizations. So that visibility, that loan of awareness is definitely lower in the industry. But I think there's a sense of realization saying we need to get that no sophistication into our network and provide that visibility to our teams.

So to your point, there are always been network managers. We're giving them better visibility observability tools, but there's also all the application folks, there's cloud infrastructure, is the way it teams in the telecom space, the way they're organized, gonna evolve and change. 'cause sometimes I feel like all these silos are helpful some days and not so helpful other days.

I absolutely think so. I think and and and the technology like generative AI, I think is the best catalyst that you can bring these teams together. 'cause I think generative AI is this once in a lifetime technologies that we will see that will completely have an impact on every part of the organization, especially in teleco.

So when you look at generative AI for an example, it's the technology that's in there, but it allows processes to get automated which touch different part of the organization. It gets data that's gonna be accessible into jive ai, which comes from the likes of network. And in it and it brings, it forces the conversation across us and that that all these divisions to say, what am I solving for and what value am I bringing it to my customers?

So I think as a catalyst journey, AI will be one of the catalysts that will bring these organizations together if they aren't already. I think there's a lot of focus in bringing that together anyway, but a use case Ontario will probably be a great catalyst to doing. So You've been in the telecom space for a while.

What's that one thing you see folks doing that just makes you shake your head and go, folks, we can be better than that? Um, There's quite a few I would say. Um, I mean you always get surprised.

Um, we've seen customers that talk about emails being still used. Um, you know, kind, it was funny, it was speaking to one of our customers and they talked about one of the systems that they wanted to pull out and replace. Um, and I went back to say, when was it implemented?

And it was actually implemented before I was born. And it kind of tell, tells you that there are so many systems that we relied on today that actually have, have been there for such a long time that even service partner for that matter will not be able to tell you what functions they perform. And the only way to do it, and this was a great customer up in Canada actually, that said, we'd have to pull off the system to say who's screaming.

And if nobody's screaming, we realize the system is not being used. And actually that's what it did, and that's it worked. So there's, there's never adu moment in the telecommunication ministry.

Sure. All right folks. I would just say one thing, don't just randomly pull stuff because it can really end badly, but I get the point.

But hey, thanks for coming back. You so much, Mike. Appreciate the time And we'll be back in a minute.