Benefits of Model-Based Management

Service provider margins are under attack from two different directions:

• Commoditization and competition between providers is causing a decline in average revenue per user (ARPU).
• At the same time, service delivery costs are on the rise, driven primarily by operational expenses (OpEx) that require a fair bit of human involvement.

Enterprise IT organizations are faced with similar OpEx increases:

• End-user appetite for application functionality is ever-growing...
• ... while at the same time cloud and virtualization technologies have made it more challenging to deliver and manage these applications.

Ubicity provides tools that aim to help stem this tide. Our Model-Based Service Management approach offers a number of OpEx reduction benefits that result from portability, visibility, and automation.

Portability

Ubicity service management is based on Intent Models that specify end-to-end service functionality in a declarative fashion while abstracting away the low-level details related to service deployment.

Mapping these models into infrastructure and cloud-specific deployment operations is the task of the Orchestrator rather than of the service designer.

Not only do intent models significantly reduce the cost of designing and deploying new services, they also guarantee that services can be designed to be portable across different cloud platforms. This enables write once, deploy everywhere service development.

Unified Visibility

Ubicity uses the Tosca standard to model all application-level services as well as the application components and network functions used by those services.

We also use Tosca for modeling the infrastructure on which these services are deployed. Both physical and virtual infrastructure can get modeled, as well as the relationships between physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, network functions, and application components.

Using consistent modeling technologies across all layers enables unified visibility into all management aspects of service provider or enterprise IT infrastructure.

Automation

Automated management of application-level services requires system responses to service events (such as faults, SLA violations, security issues, etc.) in an autonomous fashion without human intervention where possible.

Declarative intent models provide the necessary service topology context within which service events can be propagated. This allows events to be steered to those components that are capable of responding to those events, which will allow all aspects of service management to be automated over time.